The end of the year can be a chaotic time, and all too frequently we’ve seen businesses prioritize their marketing strategy last. If you’re still working out your strategy or haven’t begun it yet, consider these 5 steps to map out the most successful marketing strategy for 2018.

1. Review Last Year’s Achievements: Before starting to set goals and brainstorming ideas for the future, it’s important that you look back at the past year. You can even take a deeper look at years prior to that. List out what your failures and successes were in those years and what went into contributing to those. Feeling stuck on how to dive deeper into these events? Check out Wrike’s list of questions to help you better evaluate past years’ marketing initiatives.

2. Set and Understand Objectives: Setting hard goals and the benchmarks for success may seem easy, but often time marketing benchmarks are siloed into monthly visits, leads and sales opportunities. Instead, consider expanding your benchmarks to metrics like percentage of leads vs. unique website visitors, percentage of leads vs. conversions, and monthly recurring revenue. Another difficult element once you’ve determined these goals and objectives is sticking to them throughout the year and not losing sight of them.

3. Determine Resources: An obvious next step after you’ve set your goals is determining the tools and resources your company needs to succeed in meeting them. This series of questions recommended by Wrike will help you better evaluate what types of resources you may need while utilizing what you’ve reviewed in Step 1:

• What is my team’s typical bandwidth? Are they overloaded? → If yes, consider resources for hiring additional team members
• How are the communication channels? Are you working with remote teams extensively? → If yes, consider investing in a collaboration tool
• Is data easily lost between email chains and constant meetings? Do you need a better way to organize your work? → If yes, consider adopting a work management tool
• Is your Operations team ready for the changes coming down the pike? Can they handle the workload? → If no, then consider ways to scale your marketing operations
• Is Design able to get the approvals they need quickly so they can spend more time being creative? → If no, consider ways to streamline the creative process  

4. Build Out a Content Calendar: To keep your business on track to meet your goals, creating a calendar of what type of content you’d like to see to support that is an extremely useful tool. Mapping out what email campaigns you’d like to send, conferences you’d like to attend, blogs you’d like to write, etc. will help keep you consistently on track to reach your goals. Wrike even recommends working backwards, meaning:

• Think about “where you want to be at the very end of the year. Not just you, but your customers (and potential customers) as well. What should they think about when they see your brand? How do you want them to feel when they read an email from your organization? What kind of insights do you want to see from them?” Once you’ve figured that out, outline what needs to happen to get there.

5. Launch the Strategy: Lastly, once you’ve nailed down your 2018 marketing strategy, celebrate! Whether it’s a big event or small internal one (like team building exercises!), celebrate the fact you are kicking off the new year with a fresh outlook and plan for the year ahead.

What steps have helped you strategize for the business in advance of a new year? Feel free to leave your experiences and ideas in the comments below!