It seems like everyone, especially early-stage growth companies and B2B marketers, experiences the end of the year as a mad scramble to the end. It’s a whirlwind of jamming to meet sales quotas, deliver on objectives, complete projects, and close the books on the year. With all the year-end requirements and transactional demands, it’s no wonder that most companies barely do much if any marketing planning for the following year – in fact, only 50% of companies say they even create a documented marketing plan. And in many cases, marketing plan development ends up getting pushed into the first quarter, meaning the beginning of the year barely has any planned approach.
But lost in this mayhem of year-end is the opportunity to tee up next year’s plan to drive better strategy, productivity, and performance. And taking advantage of this opportunity now makes sense, because next year’s marketing plan should be built off of the current year – and, as I’ve written here before, feel like the next chapter in a book, and not some independent, new storyline.
So, whether you’ve finalized your 2025 marketing plan or haven’t even gotten started, here are some ways you can begin before the year-end to build next year’s improved strategic marketing plan.
- Year-end marketing lessons learned: Of course, most work as the year ends is focused on closing deals and finishing 2024’s projects. But, while the year is still fresh in everyone’s mind, set up a session to review what worked and what you learned this year. What programs were most effective and why? Where did you find the most traction – what messages, what platforms, which tools? What have you learned – are there any new insights? Catalog these – and use them when building the plan and tactics for ’25.
- Align Marketing and Sales on customer learnings, objectives and approaches: Identify what new insights did you learn from your customer acquisition efforts this year? What helped close new customers, and what were their reservations or reasons when you didn’t? What learnings can you gather from new users’ on-boarding? Has anything changed in the customers’ contexts that could affect you in the new year? Connect with the sales/growth team and formalize your thoughts and findings – and set the framework for 2025.
- Data deep-dive to fine-tune objectives: Review your marketing and sales performance for the year and how you did against objectives. Most importantly, identify key learnings – and where did your hypotheses pan out, and where were there surprises? What key learnings should you take into next year’s planning – and how should they fine-tune your objectives and strategies moving forward?
Part of this exercise should include an evaluation of your website performance, looking into inbound traffic, referring sources, page performance and page views, and repeat visitors. Identify patterns and insights around site messaging, user experience, and stickiness to optimize its performance, improve conversion, and enhance engagement in the new year. - Optimize segmentations and personas: Analyze your customer data for shifts, nuances, changes, or new areas/segments to focus on. Identify any additional information that might help crystallize or provide finer points to your customer personas. Can you more accurately reflect the customer’s needs or challenges better? Any better strategic focus you can add will be helpful in the new year to make your plan more pointed, targeted, and persuasive.
- Audit and optimize your customer data: Ensure your customer data is up-to-date and accurate, and that you are leveraging data and insights to build marketing that generates demand, purposefully nurtures leads, and helps you convert new customers. Consider what efforts can be evolved, added, or built next year to be even more customer-focused – and what can be automated and further personalized.
The end of 2024 is streaking by – and there’s still a ton to do. But don’t let the year go by without giving yourself a head-start for 2025.
*Originally published in MediaPost’s Marketing Insider
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