The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to set meaningful goals and actionable intentions for your business.
Before you start pulling numbers from thin air, or overwhelming yourself with more ideas than you have the resources for, I’d encourage you to make dedicated time to reflect on the insights you have available to you from this past operating year.
By reviewing your goals, sales, analytics, and marketing campaigns, you can make more informed decisions moving forward – prioritizing what will truly drive growth and success in the year ahead.
Here are 5 areas of review to focus on.
01: Goals and Intentions Review
Begin by taking a look back at this past year as a whole. Make time for honest reflection and evaluation of the ups and downs you experienced, as well as the goals you did and didn’t reach.
Reflect on the year.
How do you feel about all that you accomplished? What did you learn? What are a few words you would use to describe the year as a whole?
Review your goals.
If you set objectives or intentions at the beginning of this past year, take some time to look back on them.
- Did you achieve them? Why or why not? What obstacles stood in your way?
- Were you a little too ambitious? Or, do you think you could have pushed yourself further?
Evaluate everything from your sales, to your marketing initiatives, to your business, team, and/or personal growth (or lack thereof).
Celebrate your successes.
What went well this year? What are you grateful for? Taking some time to celebrate your successes (big and small) can help get you into a powerful frame of mind to start planning for the new year.
Look beyond sales numbers.
Financial health is an important measure of business success and sustainability. But it’s not the only metric that matters (and may not even be the most important depending on your situation)!
As you review your year, be sure to look beyond sales. Consider,
- Your sense of overall work-life balance. What were your working hours like? Did you take vacation? Did you make time for rest and self-care?
- Your network. Did you meet new people and expand your network? By the way – our Magnificent Marketer’s Club is the perfect community to join if networking is a goal of yours! Or, maybe this past year you prioritized maintaining already established relationships?
- Your boundaries. Did you uphold the boundaries you set? Did you clearly communicate these boundaries to others?
- Your values. Was the work you did this year aligned with your core values? How did you give back to your community?
Plan for the new year.
Based on everything you’ve uncovered in this reflection and review, begin making plans for the year ahead.
- What will you do differently this year?
- What will you keep doing?
- How can you refine your processes?
- What do you want to focus on moving forward?
- What new goals do you have?
Reflecting on your successes with gratitude, as well as being honest about the challenges you faced (and looking for learning opportunities within them), can help you provide clarity on your direction and vision for the year ahead.
02: Social Media Review
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn will likely be part of your marketing strategy moving forward.
With the sheer number of users across each of these platforms, having an online presence on a social media site relevant to your audience might be key to expanding your reach and growing your business.
If you have social media data to look back on, take some time to analyze your previous performance so you can better shape your strategy moving forward.
Look at engagement levels across platforms.
Where does your audience seem to be hanging out? Take a look at direct messages, likes, comments, and shares to gauge interaction and engagement.
Assess your posting schedule.
Did you have a posting schedule this past year? Were you consistent in following it? What does consistency mean to you and your business? Which platforms were easier to maintain, and where did you face challenges?
Analyze your conversion rates.
How much of your audience is coming from social media? Are your efforts driving leads, sales and/or traffic? Or, does it make more sense for you to invest your energy elsewhere?
Refine your strategy.
What do these analytics tell you? Use these insights to inform your strategy moving forward.
- If you’re happy with your analytics, that’s incredible! How can you keep this momentum going?
- If things seem to have fallen short, dig a little deeper. Why do you think this was? Are you showing up in the wrong places? Or maybe, not showing up enough? Could the lack of engagement be due to the type of content you’re posting? Do you need more structure, systems, or pre-emptive planning to keep you on track?
What’s sounding new and exciting to you?
What’s been inspiring you lately? Are there new content forms you’re looking to dive into this year?
Set your goals accordingly. Create a plan that focuses your time and energy on the social platforms that are likely to deliver the results you’re hoping for this year.
03: Website Review
Your website is often a primary point of contact and reference for both current and prospective clients. Auditing its design, structure, flow, and content can help ensure your website is primed to support you in hitting your business goals.
Assess brand alignment.
Is your website aligned with your brand? What about the vision and direction you have for your company this year?
Do the fonts, colours, and images accurately represent your current brand identity? Is the content on your website accurate and relevant? What changes could be made to create more cohesion?
Analyze your analytics.
Review the metrics you have available to you. Page views, user sessions, time spent on page, and bounce rates (the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page), can help provide insights into website performance as well as user behaviour.
Identify opportunities for improvement.
What do these insights tell you about your audience? What about your website as a whole? Are there bottlenecks you could streamline? Broken links to fix? Content that needs to be updated?
How can you tweak your website based on this information, to enhance user experience? What about boosting SEO?
I have an entire blog post on ways to refresh your website, to help you strategically update your site for the new year. This post goes into more detail in terms of analyzing metrics and assessing what they might mean!
04: Advertising Review
Paid ads are often an overlooked form of marketing for small business owners. They’re generally seen as expensive, time consuming, and cumbersome to manage, but they don’t have to be!
There are many budget friendly ways to take advantage of paid advertising to broaden your audience and increase growth.
If you’ve experimented with ads in the past, take some time to analyze your efforts.
Evaluate campaigns.
Did you run ads this past year? Were they effective in achieving the objectives you set?
- If they were, how could you mimic this formula to find success again this year?
- If they weren’t as impactful as you hoped, consider why they may have fallen short. Did you set clear objectives before-hand? Did you monitor the ads and optimize along the way? Were the ads themselves the issue, or was there something else in the customer journey that needed tweaking?
Consider your budget.
Do you have the budget for more ads this year? Is this an area you want to focus more on? Determine whether or not ads will play a role in this year’s marketing strategy so you can allocate resources accordingly.
If ads aren’t your area of expertise and you aren’t sure how to analyze these metrics or integrate ads into your marketing strategy this year, I’d love to help support you.
05: Email Marketing Review
Email marketing remains an important tool for connecting with prospective and current consumers, sharing your knowledge, and nurturing consumer relationships.
To fully reap these benefits though, your email marketing approach should be strategic – grounded in audience feedback, subscriber behaviour, and your business and marketing goals.
Evaluate consistency.
Did you send regular email campaigns this past year to maintain consistent communication with subscribers? If not, consider how you could set a more realistic schedule for the year ahead, or put tools and procedures in place to improve consistency.
Evaluate growth.
Did your subscriber numbers grow this past year? If not, was it due to a lack of promotion on your part? Or a lack of interest from your audience? How could you make your email list more appealing? Is there a freebie or offer that would entice your audience to join your community?
Review email analytics.
Beyond subscriber rate, evaluate your email open rates, unsubscribes, and click-through rates. Did your emails perform as expected?
Compare your results to industry benchmarks to ensure you’re setting realistic expectations for yourself! For example,
- A good email open rate is generally between 17-28%, depending on the industry you’re in.
- A good click-through rate (a measure of how many people click on a hyperlink or call-to-action within your email) is 2-5%.
- The average unsubscribe rate globally is around 0.5%, but as a starting point, marketers generally recommend aiming to keep your unsubscribe rate below 2%. Remember, you want your list to be engaged! Unsubscribes are better than inactive audience members.
Analyze these insights.
What do these stats tell you about how you could shift or optimize your email marketing this upcoming year?
- If your open rates have been low, consider spending more time researching and crafting engaging subject lines.
- If people are unsubscribing more than you’d like, evaluate if you’re potentially sending too few or too many emails.
- If click-through rates are low, focus on the content of your emails to ensure they hold valuable, relevant information for your subscribers.
A thoughtful review of these analytics can help you to create a more refined schedule, engaging content, and relevant calls-to-action for the year ahead.
Craft a Comprehensive Plan for Moving Forward
An annual reflection like this isn’t just about looking back – it’s also about using these insights to shape your future:
- Reflecting on past goals and intentions (and how they panned out) can help you to set specific, relevant, and realistic goals for the year ahead.
- Taking time to celebrate your accomplishments, successes, and milestones can help spark inspiration and ideas for future projects or offers.
- Honest review and analysis of your marketing efforts and analytics can help you identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus your efforts moving forward.
Together, these insights can help form your vision and direction for the year ahead.
With this clear picture, you’ll be better prepared to craft an intentional strategy focused on growing your business and achieving your goals in the new year.
