If you’ve got New Year’s resolutions for yourself, why not set New Year’s resolutions for your knitting business?
Take a moment to sit down and look at your long-term objectives. Ready? Let’s dive into the process of setting your annual marketing goals for the new year.
1. Review the past year
Look at how you did the previous year.
Did you reach your annual marketing goals?
Summarize your learnings from the past year. Writing down a few bullet points for yourself will help you take a step back from the nitty-gritty details of the year to see the bigger picture.
You have a chance to review the past year’s performance and see what worked and what didn’t in your marketing tactics so that you can plan this year even better.
2. Your annual business goal
Your business goals should include your overall revenue goal and your marketing budget.
Use the previous year’s performance to project how you’ll do this year.
Your marketing goals should help you reach your annual business revenue.
You should have more than one marketing goal, but try to keep it down to 3-4 high-level goals that you want to focus on for the year.
Here are a few examples to get you started: new customers, new visitors to your website, email leads, conversion rate, and retention rate.
3. Key marketing channels
You’ve already done the work to establish what worked this year, and you want to keep the winning marketing channels.
Outline your top marketing channels, channels you want to test, and channels that didn’t work. These will set the structure for your marketing plan, and help you determine how to allocate your resources for the year.
Evaluate if you want to spend money on marketing in the new year.
Can you spend more on the best-performing channels?
Based on these choices, you’ve got yourself a marketing budget!
4. Your plan
Each time you’re coming up with new tactics, remember to revisit your goals to ensure they’re aligned. That way, you won’t waste precious resources and time on efforts that don’t end up helping you reach your goal.
By dividing up your goal into quarterly or monthly goals, you make them easier to track and stay on top.
You can set a regular check-in to determine how you’re doing against specific milestones. Take this check-in time to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.
And keep your seasonality in mind when breaking your goal down into milestones. If your sales tend to peak in autumn and winter because you sell hats and mittens, you should weight your purchases to those periods.
Have you set your annual marketing goals for next year yet?
Ask your questions here.
I’d love to help you make next year as successful as it can be!