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 prep 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 2022 plans now. Otherwise, you’ll burn away the first few weeks of January trying to catch up.
Set Your 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 bring on new employees? Outlining any operational, administrative, or non-specific goals is an important part of staying focused on the big picture.
Establish a Marketing Budget
Make a list of the different marketing activities you use or would like to explore in the new year; web development, seminar marketing, community events, lead generation, etc. 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. But it will give you a foundation on which to build your overall plan of attack. Plus, you can start the year off with a better idea of the returns you would like to see from each investment.
Personal and Professional Development
Your plan for a bigger and better 2022 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.
- 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.
- Keep up with emerging trends in social media marketing.
- I want to do video marketing this year and will practice my on-camera presence and delivery.
The examples above may not be what you think of when drafting a marketing plan, but both 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 2022 Year in Marketing desktop calendar. Filled with invaluable information, the calendar is custom-tailored to independent producers and will ensure your 2022 starts strong and finishes even stronger!
What’s inside:
- Quarterly production goals tracking
- Important dates and reminders
- Relevant planning tips
- Monthly marketing ideas
Click below to request your calendar today.
