End of Year Business Evaluation and New Year Forecasting

When it comes to your business, we know you’re always thinking about the future. Now is the time to set your business and marketing goals for the next 12 months, and start working on your marketing strategy. What should you do first? First and foremost, you’ll want to identify your specific business goals for the year. Once your business goals are identified, you can work on your marketing strategy and plan. Our tips below help give you insight into why every business should have a marketing strategy and six questions to ask yourself when creating one.

What are your business goals? 

Smart marketing initiatives should be directly tied to your business goals for the best outcomes. Once you have a list of your business goals, you can start thinking about your marketing goals. You may decide that you want to generate high-quality leads, raise brand awareness of your business, boost brand engagement or increase returning customers. These are just a few examples of marketing goals to consider when creating your marketing strategy. 

Remember, you may not be able to accomplish all of them at once. Prioritize your goals and then tie specific marketing tactics to each goal to help you visualize how you might achieve them. Your goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.  

Why should I develop a marketing strategy? 

A marketing strategy is a must-have for all businesses. Without a marketing strategy, you’re likely not seeing the engagement, sales, or customer/client retention that you want to be seeing with your business. Don’t go another year without a marketing strategy.

If you already have a marketing strategy, that’s great! You are probably in a better place compared to your competitors. However, a marketing strategy should be constantly reviewed and refreshed just like a business plan. There are new trends, new needs, and new customers that you may be missing out on if you don’t regularly revise your marketing strategy and plan.

If creating or revising your marketing strategy feels overwhelming, or if you’re unsure where to begin, the Bellrae Marketing team can help. 

Our collaborative approach helps us define your marketing goals together so that we can build a custom plan to drive success for your business. Our marketing strategies include a detailed outline of your business goals, brand voice discovery, target personas, a SWOT analysis, competitive analysis, and more. 

What questions should I ask when evaluating my business and forecasting? 

While you are working on updating your business plans, think back over the current year. Here are six questions we like to ask ourselves when we do our end of year evaluation and new year forecasting:

1. What marketing initiatives were the most successful? What made these so successful?
2. Which marketing initiatives were not successful and why? Are they something that we can tweak and do better next year, or should we remove them from our new plan? 
3. How do your marketing metrics look? This is something that should be tracked on a monthly basis, but looking at it holistically at the end of the year is always a good idea. You can compare it to the previous year and identify trends. 
4. Even more importantly, are you on track to hit the revenue goals you set at the beginning of the year? Why or why not? 
5. Which products or services have the best gross margin? What do you want to increase or scale back on in the new year?
6. What changes do you need to make to hit your new revenue goal for 2023? 

Don’t delay your marketing strategy any longer. If you need some additional advice, reach out to Bellrae Marketing today and we can help you take the next steps toward generating more revenue and creating engaged customers and clientele. 

Let’s do this!