New Year, New Plan: How to Plan Your Annuals

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January 7, 2020 at 9:45 AM

New Year, New Plan- How to Plan Your Annuals

Now that the new year has arrived, it is time to prepare your annual advertising plan. Here’s what you need to know as you work on planning your annuals for the new year.

Audit the Current Year’s Successes

In order to plan for the new year, you will need to perform a full audit of last year’s marketing successes. An audit is important to do before planning your annual advertisements moving forward. To do so effectively, evaluate the digital marketing metrics and other data you have on hand from your campaigns.

As you dig through the data, ask:

  • What parts of the campaigns resonated most with your clients?
  • Where did you see the most growth?
  • What marketing channels or methods were underutilized?
  • Was there significant improvements over the prior year’s results?

Overall, try to verify that the marketing efforts made sense in helping you achieve your goals. Did they hit the mark? If not, what needs to change to ensure they can? By answering all these questions, you can get a clear picture of what needs to happen in the coming year to ensure your team’s efforts lead to your desired results.

Decide What Your Main Objectives Will Be

With an understanding of what worked, and what didn’t, you can determine where to put your time and money in marketing your business — and who you want to reach. Then, you can create SMART goals to guide your marketing program. These goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific, which help to guide your efforts throughout the year.

If you have trouble setting these goals, consider working with a media partner for key insights and direction. They will assist in creating actionable goals that are designed to promote the growth of your company.

Come up with a Game Plan for Campaigns

As soon as you define your company’s SMART goals, the path ahead will become clear — and much more approachable. You will still need to spell out a game plan for all your upcoming campaigns, allowing you to pick up beneficial annual contracts.

By skipping the short-term contracts, you can ensure your efforts align with your goals year-round. You can then create better quality, streamlined campaigns that promote the growth of your company. You can also build brand awareness much faster as positive chatter ramps up from the start and continues throughout the campaign.

To keep everyone on the same page, create a calendar with all the planned campaigns, including annual contracts. Link the campaigns to the ideal objectives to prepare for the next step.

Set Clear Standards for All of the Objectives

With all the key objectives defined and the campaigns planned out on the calendar, teams can start to set the standards to operate by throughout the year. Your standards should build upon the overall marketing goals, providing team members with the direction they need to succeed.

Standards to set include:

  • Number of followers ideally gained with each campaign
  • Total new customers attracted to the brand by a set date
  • Reach achieved with the different marketing campaigns

By answering these questions, your marketing team can make improvements to their approach in response to the data coming their way. If you are not ready to accomplish this goal on your own, however, a media partner can assist. They are well-versed in using the software programs and other tools to generate actionable data and create a plan ahead.

Assign Tasks to Get the Plan Moving

With a clear path forward, all that is left to do is assign tasks to get the plan moving. Be sure to assign tasks to different team members based on their strengths to determine who is best qualified. By selecting the ideal person for each task, you will be able to achieve the best results with every campaign. 

By following this process, you can learn just how to plan your annual advertising and achieve greater success each year. If you would like to elevate your success, consider working with a media company. They can help guide your planning process, set up effective campaigns, delegate to professionals and execute the plan, so you can concentrate on the results and hopefully new business coming your way.

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