Take a look back before you plan your future
Planning is crucial in business. If you want your professional services firm to be the best in a large pool of competition, you need to plan.
The crucial thing to do at the beginning of each year is to reflect on the past year and use the insights to plan for the year ahead.
Naturally, planning is something that you should do more often than once a year, but annual planning should be more detailed than your quarterly or monthly planning. By collating your efforts, documenting your learnings, and planning marketing programs for the months to come, you’ll have a more clear vision in front of you.
Let’s take a look at how that should work:
Taking a look back at the year that passed
- Take a good look at the number of leads you made – all marketing campaigns are best evaluated by taking a look at the number of leads they generated. And an entire year’s worth of lead generation will effectively show how good your campaigns were. If the figures show an upward trend, then you’re on a good path. If not, improvement is needed.
- As usual, always check on ROI – it’s the one metric that’s always necessary. Naturally, you should have ROI for specific campaigns, not just for overall success.
- Gather insights from client feedback – if you ask for client feedback and actively collect it, then you’ll have a lot of data at the end of the year. Now is the right time to check all of it and gain important insights that will enable you to make better plans for the year ahead.
- Check social media numbers – we all know that social media is a big part of the world of business today. That’s why it’s necessary to take a good look at what your numbers are at the end of the year. How have they grown and what spurred your growth?
Planning for the year that started
- Continue to work on getting to know your target market – you probably already know your target clients, but it’s still important to reevaluate what you know and make improvements.
- Learn which problems plague your niche market – the same goes with your target market; you need to reevaluate what you know about your niche market and define the problems the potential clients have.
- Work on your expertise – you might be a thought leader already, but it’s essential to keep learning.
- Ensure you are active on social media and in the industry – that way you’ll ensure you stay relevant to your current and potential clients.
Key takeaways
All in all, it’s vital to take a good look back before you move to the future. Once you’ve gained insights from the past year, you can implement what you learned and start planning for the year ahead.
If you take the advice we’ve given you here and combine it with what you know, you’ll be the best version of a thought leader you can be.