The end of the year is a good time for marketers to reflect on their successes and learning opportunities, and plan for the following year. We know that it’s only August, but year-end planning should always start earlier rather than later.
Here are some tips to help you with your year-end marketing process this year.
Review What Worked Best For Your Brand
The best way to make your brand a success is to learn from the past. A review of what worked best for your brand will help you create more successful marketing campaigns in the future.
When reviewing what worked best, consider:
- What content did people engage with most? Why?
- What content received the least engagement? What can we learn from this?
- Which channels were effective at reaching audiences and connecting with them? Why?
- Which platforms have been the biggest traffic drivers so far this year?
- Were there any new platforms that we introduced? What were the results?
In addition to reviewing what worked best, look at how people interacted with your brand throughout the year. Did they respond better when you sent emails or when you posted on social media? What type of content received the most engagement from followers? These are important things to know as you begin creating new campaigns for next year!
Always look at your content sharing the same message but in different formats to identify the type of content that worked best. This type of review is great to do at any time, but as you start planning for the New Year, it’s essential to do this to help you plan ahead.
Know What’s Working In Your Industry
One of the best ways to keep up-to-date with what’s working in your industry is to know what your competitors are up to. If you can get a sense of the latest trends, you’ll be able to anticipate them and capitalize on them on a regular basis. You can do a competitor analysis with your team on a regular basis and identify who is leveraging new trends. Could these types of trends also help your brand?
Additionally, make sure that you’re keeping an eye on what your customers want and need; this will help ensure that new products or services are relevant and useful for your customers.
A great way to deliver exactly what people want is to ask for customer feedback: if there’s anything they don’t like about the way things work now, or if there’s something they’d like changed in order for their experience with you as a company (or individual) to improve, take note!
Do New Market Research
Doing new market research is a great way to get a head start for the new year. As you think about next year, consider what trends are likely to impact your business and how you can use them to your advantage. What are the biggest challenges facing your industry? How can you prepare for those challenges? What are the biggest challenges that your audience face? What types of content can you introduce in your strategy to support them?
Start Planning For The New Year
While it may seem like you’re in the midst of a busy season, there’s still time to plan ahead. Here are some tips to get ahead for 2023.
- Identify some new sales goals for the year.
- Review your brand messaging, has it changed, is it the same?
- Review your service offerings or product-stack. Anything here to change?
- Are you and your team happy with your tech? Perhaps it’s time to introduce new software.
- Are your current content creation processes working? Any feedback received recently that you want to visit and implement?
When you’re working on your marketing strategy for the upcoming year, be sure not to get too caught up in what worked well last year.
Consumer behaviors are always changing and adapting, so it’s important that brands do as well. Reviewing what worked best for your brand can help guide how you spend resources going forward, but even if someone is working today, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan to test new strategies.
Happy planning!
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