No, not the shopping time. Nor the eating time. It’s planning time!
Sometime after Thanksgiving and before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve most every business who operates on a standard year fiscal calendar is busy reviewing past performance in preparation for new year planning and budgeting.
Whether you’re hard at work developing your 2025 marketing plan or still looking for time on your calendar to prepare, here are a few must-steps to take before you start your 2025 plan:
1. Dig out last year’s plan. Go back and dust it off to see what you committed to doing in 2024. If you haven’t been using last year’s plan as a rubric, revisiting it at least monthly or quarterly to see where you stand, then it may be more difficult for you to gauge performance. Set that as a goal for process improvement in 2025!
2. Pull metrics. For every activity there should be some kind of metric or ROI. While sales and leadership would like every marketing effort to have a direct revenue correlation, we know that isn’t the case. Still, each effort should have some kind of metric. When you said you were going to publish a monthly newsletter, did you actually publish 12 issues? When you said you were going to focus on growing your social media audience, did you reflect monthly on the growth of connections, posts, impressions and engagements? If you set a goal around form completions or paid ad spend, were you patient enough to give it time to work and dutifully check metrics with regular frequency?
3. Check off what you accomplished then reflect on those successes. What activities worked well and why? How did they contribute to your overall business success? Are they practical and appropriate to continue? Do they align with 2025 business objectives? Do you have the budget and staff to carry them forward?
4. Consider what you omitted then figure out why. Sometimes activities fall to the wayside because they were good in concept but not practical for application. Perhaps neither budget nor staffing were approved, they were overshadowed by a more pressing matter, or you simply forgot about them? Do you make a habit of shelving your plans once approved only to show them the light of day at EOY planning? Whatever the excuse, take the time to reflect on each individual activity and assess why you omitted it, whether this idea might have been effective had you tried it and if it should be something that is reconsidered for the new year.
5. Let the cream rise to the top. Take your best ideas, your highest performers and your biggest contributors, then combine them with those overlooked but good concepts and use this list as the starting point for your 2025 marketing planning whiteboard activity. Put them on virtual or physical Post- it notes. Surround yourself with this well-documented inspiration. Take a deep breath. Consider yourself equipped for productive time planning 2025.
This blog was contributed by Jennifer Koon, Principal of Michael Mackenzie Communications.