The effort you put in at the end of one year can have a significant impact on how you start the next. This is a good time for settling accounts, getting your books in order, and conducting holiday marketing activities. But what are you doing to prepare for the beginning of the new year? While this can be a hectic and distracting time, it’s vital to carve out time in your schedule to work on your 2024 plans now. Otherwise, you’ll burn away the first few weeks of January trying to catch up.
Assess and Set Realistic Goals
Break down your various production goals into monthly or quarterly increments. This is an efficient way to track your progress and determine whether you need to make any adjustments to your plan. Set up a document that outlines your monthly/quarterly production goals and split those goals into specific categories. As the year progresses, compare those goals to your results.
This will give you an organized and detailed overview of your growth. Aside from production and revenue, consider the other goals you’d like to achieve over the next year. Do you want to target new markets? Or recruit new agents? Outlining any operational, administrative, or non-specific goals is an important part of staying focused on the big picture.
Budget Accordingly
Make a list of the different marketing activities you use or would like to explore in the new year – social media, seminar marketing, brand awareness, lead generation, or other marketing activities. Now, assign a dollar amount you feel comfortable spending on each. This won’t be a concrete budget, as changing trends and results will likely call for periodic adjustments. However, it will give you a foundation on which to build your overall plan of attack. This will help you start the year off with a better idea of the returns you would like to see from each investment.
Sharpen Your Skills
Your plan for a bigger and better 2024 should include more than quantifiable metrics like goals-versus-results and revenues-versus-expenses. Think about steps you can take to grow as both a person and a professional. What can you do to better serve your clients? How can you build credibility? What are your strengths and weaknesses? You might be a financial guru who could fill a book with retirement advice but need to brush up on your writing skills. Or maybe you want to tap into video marketing but tend to freeze up in front of the camera. We all have areas in which we could improve, and they certainly don’t take away from our tangible job skills. However, pinpointing certain weaknesses and working to overcome them can be very beneficial to your business. Think of personal and professional development as a list of New Year’s resolutions that you won’t forget about by the end of January.
Examples:
- Sharpen my writing skills and improve the quality of my original blog content.
- Learn more about generational marketing, so I can more effectively target Millennials and prepare for Gen Zers when they enter the market.
- Draft content on the potential market volatility that we could see close to the election.
- Research local venues that would work well for seminars and educational workshops.
The examples above may not be what you think of when drafting a marketing plan but can have a significant impact on how well you execute that plan.
Obviously, there is so much more you will need to consider for the year to come, but it’s important to start somewhere – and just as important to get started ASAP.
Stay Organized
Kick off the new year organized and informed with our complimentary 2024 Marketing Calendar. Filled with invaluable information, the calendar is tailored to independent producers and designed to help you soar through 2024!
What’s inside:
- Quarterly production goals tracking
- Important dates and reminders
- Relevant planning tips
- Monthly marketing ideas
Supplies are limited for hard copies of the calendar. Click below to request yours today.
