End of Year Marketing: Evaluating Your Progress
DIY Sprocket Solutions
Now that we’re officially in the fourth quarter of the year, it’s time to take a look back over our efforts from the last nine months to prepare a great strategy for the new year to come. Sure, you can keep your social media marketing and content marketing efforts stagnant, but who is that helping? Who is that hurting? If you look back over what you’ve done in the last year, I don’t think you can honestly say that there isn’t any aspect you wouldn’t change, add, or improve.
That being said, you have to evaluate what’s important.
You can dream big, but on a daily basis you’re going to have to actually evaluate your plans. Start by re-assessing your goals. What are you hoping to accomplish through your marketing campaigns this year? What were your goals last year? Which of those goals did you accomplish? Which fell short? Why did they fall short? Write all of these things down –you’re going to need them to develop a plan moving forward.
Once you look at last year’s goals and where you landed with them, you can develop goals for the upcoming year. When you have that list, you’ll need to develop a plan and actual tasks to make those plans happen. Consider what you do for your marketing strategy right now on a daily basis. Have big plans, by all means, but also be realistic about what you’ll be able to do daily. If your goals are so far off from the effort that you’re actually able to put in daily, this is the point where you should consider hiring someone or outsourcing your online marketing work. Help yourself be successful.
If you think the outline of your goals and plans is manageable, give yourself deadlines. Set up tasks to execute. Use a scheduling and management tool, like Asana or something similar, to keep yourself organized. If you’re working as a team, this is a great way to assign specific roles and tasks to each person giving them specific deadlines for each one. You can also keep notes here, share files, and more.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. You don’t want to spend all of next year playing catch up. Now is the perfect opportunity to reevaluate where you are VS where you’d like to be. You have some time to look at the competition or others in the market to see what direction you could go, with a little bit of creativity, innovation, and planning.
How did you do this year? Are you where you want to be? Where did you fall short? Is social media marketing and content marketing something that you can actually effectively maintain and execute on your own? Is it time to outsource? Comment below!
Breanne Bannon
Breanne is a Content Writer, Social Media Marketeer, and Sales Associate for Sprocket Websites.
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