If you’re looking to grow your business into new areas and demographics this year, or even if you’re just wanting to get a greater slice of your market share—and who isn’t?—then you’re going to want to take a hard look at your marketing efforts. The time and energy you put into marketing, whether it’s traditional marketing or online marketing, is going to be what gets you cresting over the hill into new markets.

So to help you make that trek a little easier on yourself, here are three tips for recalculating your marketing plan for the coming year.

Recap How Last Year’s Marketing Went

You can’t very well know where you need to go unless you know where you’ve been. For this reason, Entrepreneur.com recommends for business owners and marketers to take part in a situation analysis prior to coming up with a game plan for next year’s marketing.

The information you gain from a thorough and accurate situation analysis will help you see where your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are, giving you a great springboard for creating your new marketing plan. Once the decision makers for your business are all on the same page about how the business is doing, especially from a marketing standpoint, it will be much easier to get everyone on board with your new marketing ideas for the coming year.

Get to Know Your Customers Better

When creating your updated marketing plan, the goal of your efforts on the consumer side should always be a better experience for your customers, but you can’t give this to them until you truly understand your customers. According to Katherine Arline, a contributor to BusinessNewsDaily.com, your new marketing plan is sure to be an improvement of your old marketing efforts if it allows your staff a better understanding of creating customer relationships.

There are many marketing strategies and tactics out there to light a fire under your business, and knowing your customers better will help you pinpoint the ones that will be most beneficial to you. For example, if your customers need more basic knowledge about your company or industry, a strong content marketing push could be very advantageous. On the other hand, if your customers need a better understanding of who you are as a brand and company, you may want to focus more closely on social media marketing and community outreach tactics.

Define What You Want and What You Have to Work With

Now that you know the areas you can improve on and how improvement in those areas will benefit your company and your customers, it’s all about executing those ideas effectively. To best accomplish your marketing goals, Diane Seltzer, a contributor to SBMarketingTools.com, suggests for marketers to clearly outline their marketing plans with strategies, tactics and budget restraints in mind. This will help your company in general and your employees specifically to define what the end goal of your marketing strategy is, how you plan to accomplish that goal, and what you’re willing to spend to reach that goal.

Having an updated and improved marketing strategy for the coming year will help your business stay on track with current marketing trends as well as with your evolving demographic. Keep the tips above in mind while creating your new marketing plan to see even more success next year than you did this year.