End-Of-Year Checklist: Your Strategy For 2016
Following on from part one of our end-of-year checklist series, we’re taking a look at how you can plan for the upcoming year.
As 2015 draws to a close and your employees plan their celebrations, things could be about to get very busy for you. Taking stock of all that your business has achieved over the past year is essential for you to monitor the growth of your company and measure the success of each of your projects, so it’s time for a review.
You can take a look at part one in our end-of-year checklist series by checking out this blog post!
Once you’ve measured your successes from 2015 there’s barely enough time for celebration before starting to plan for the coming year. A coherent and realistic strategy is vital: if you overpromise you’ll be left disappointed at the end of next year, and if your goals aren’t easily understood it can be hard to determine whether or not you really have succeeded.
Once you’ve decided on which areas you need to improve upon, you can set your goals for the coming year. Your objectives should be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timely
Using the above framework you can set your goals for 2016. For example, a blogger may set the following objective:
- Specific: Attract 50 more subscribers.
- Measurable: Monitor the number of subscribers from beginning of the year to the end.
- Attainable: This is attainable based on a blogger who currently has 50-100 followers and has been blogging for one year.
- Realistic: Based on the growth the blog has seen over the past year, this seems like a realistic goal.
- Timely: A time limit of one year has been set.
Set several of these goals so that this time next year you’ll have measurable criteria to determine how the year has gone. For larger businesses these goals can be set throughout the year to measure the success of all marketing and sales objectives.
Once you’ve set your objectives for 2016, check out our next blog post in the end-of-year checklist, and answer some important questions!