The Significance of Creating a Yearly Recap for Your Business
Do you create an annual recap for your business? Or if you’re a marketing agency representing multiple brands, do you create a yearly recap for each of your clients? If recaps are not currently on your radar, we highly suggest incorporating this end-of-year tactic into your business plan. What exactly is an end of year recap? In simple terms, it’s an assessment of the previous year, to see if the company’s goals were achieved. Throughout this post, we’re elaborating on the significance of this end of year task as well as highlighting the benefits of what it can do to help your business.
Organization
Creating a yearly recap gives you a clear, concise layout of all the important analytics associated with your brand throughout the previous year. At Dion Marketing, depending on our client, we create our recaps in Microsoft PowerPoint, organizing slides together per topic. Since information is being pulled over the span of a full year, it can be overwhelming to track every goal and initiative as well as their corresponding results. So, we find that starting early with each recap is the key to being organized. Microsoft PowerPoint specifically is a convenient way to navigate through the past year and easy for the entire team to quickly access. Having a record of each year’s goals, tactics and results in one place will get your brand on the right track when it comes to internal (or external) organization. More complicated recaps that include lots of text plus spreadsheets, graphs, and charts, can be achieved in Microsoft Word.
Comparison
Another key reason why creating an annual recap is crucial for your business is because it allows you to compare your brand’s analytics from the previous year. You should keep track of long-term trends to see if your business is improving over time. If you’re not comparing stats year after year, how are you measuring your company’s success? Whether it be revenue, social growth, online sales, etc., you’ll want to compare each year’s numbers to determine how your business is doing as a whole and on individual levels. Having an easy to access recap is extremely effective to reference to throughout the year when you need to quickly pull information from previous years.
Planning
Once you put together an annual recap, you’ll be able to confirm which goals you’ve achieved vs. which goals may overlap into the upcoming year. Recaps also help with establishing new goals, as you’ll be able to conveniently analyze all the important aspects of your business and visualize the future of your brand. In addition, recaps not only help you create future goals and initiatives, but they help you to prioritize them as well. As you’re reviewing the previous year, if you notice your company is falling short in a certain area, you’ll be able to strategically focus on those areas, moving them to the top of your list come January 1.
Next week, we’ll be diving in a little bit deeper with a step by step on how we create our yearly recaps. So be on the lookout for Part 2! In the meantime, if you need end of year marketing guidance, contact us today! We offer advertising, design and PR services, all of which can help get your brand on the right track to end 2019 with a bang and head into 2020 on the right note.