As the year winds down, most marketers are thinking about holiday campaigns, reviewing Q4 deliverables, and tying up loose ends. But there’s one task that can make a bigger impact on next year than any last-minute push: a thoughtful review of the past 12 months.

For marketing and advertising teams an end-of-year assessment isn’t just a nice tradition. It’s a chance to pause, zoom out, and understand what worked, what didn’t, and how to set yourself up for a more efficient, more creative and more rewarding year ahead.

How do you go about conducting a meaningful year-end review and then turn insights into an actionable plan for next year?

Start by Reviewing the Work Itself

Look back at your projects, campaigns, pitches and deliverables from the past year. What felt strong? Did anything fall short? Were there things that surprised you?

Questions to ask yourself as you’re reviewing the work:

• Which projects delivered the best results for clients and why?
• Which projects were the most creatively fulfilling?
• What took more time or budget than expected?
• Which deliverables consistently ran smoothly?
• What bottlenecks or frustrations came up repeatedly?

Look for patterns here, not one-off issues. These patterns will tell you where your firm naturally excels and where possible tweaks could make a difference next year.

Evaluate Your Processes

Even the best work can feel stressful if the work behind the scenes isn’t efficient. Reviewing your processes helps you identify where extra time can be eliminated, or needs to be added, next year. Put best practices in place. Write down processes that work to share with the team and onboard with new team members.

Questions to ask when reviewing processes:

• Where did communication break down?
• Did we have the right information at the right time?
• Were timelines realistic or chaotic?
• Did approvals or revisions slow things down?
• Did we use our tools effectively?

When taking a look at your processes, look for repeated snags or bottlenecks, overcomplicated workflows that can be simplified, missing steps that caused confusion, and tasks that always seemed to fall through the cracks. Process updates for next year will mean an easier year and a happier team!

Reviewing Your Team’s Capacity, Skills and Collaboration

A strong team is the core of a strong year. Assess whether or not everyone is working together well. Are there different communication techniques that could be used across the board for stronger connections?

Questions to ask yourself when reviewing your team’s strengths:

• Did team members feel overloaded at any point?
• Where did people shine, and where did they struggle?
• Did cross-discipline collaboration happen naturally or did silos form?
• Are there skills the team wants to learn in able to grow?

Look for opportunities to build up strengths and support areas needing more structure, tools or training.

Examine Your Client Relationships

Reviewing the past year in terms of client relationships helps guide you forward and grow your business. Find what types of clients or industries you want to attract next year, and which ones you may need to reevaluate, by reviewing your client base every year.

Questions to ask yourself when reviewing clients:

• Who were your strongest partnerships? Why?
• Where did expectations misalign?
• Were you proactive or reactive in your communication?
• Are there clients you’d love to replicate, or ones that weren’t a great fit?

Now Turn Your Review Into Next Year’s Plan

Once you’ve assessed the year, it’s time to transform insights into a strategic plan.

As you look ahead, start by identifying the strengths you want to carry forward. Don’t reinvent what’s already working well. Instead, recognize the processes, tools and team dynamics that consistently support strong outcomes. Maybe that was a solid creative brainstorm structure, reliable kickoff briefs, smooth approvals or content formats that performed especially well.

Equally important is acknowledging what didn’t work and choosing just a few meaningful improvements to focus on next year. You don’t need sweeping overhauls, just simple changes like streamlining intake forms, improving briefs, adding mid-project check-ins, investing in a useful new tool, tightening your revision process or strengthening client onboarding. Choose improvements that will make the biggest impact overall, and implement them for next year.

From there, use the insights gathered in your review to set specific, data-informed goals. These might include reducing turnaround times or launching new services. To make these goals truly effective, involve your entire team in shaping them. Because your team lived the work this year, they can offer invaluable observations, surface opportunities for improvement, suggest fixes, and help you prioritize what matters most. When everyone participates in building the plan, they’re more invested in bringing it to life.

From Reviewing to ReDoing

Finally, turn your insights into a clear “next-year playbook.” It can be as simple as a one-pager or a more detailed document. Both work. What matters is capturing the key takeaways from your review, outlining what will stay the same and what will change, clarifying team goals, identifying tools or training to implement and articulating your vision for the year ahead. It’s a guide your team can reference throughout the year to stay aligned, accountable and focused on continuous improvement.

Now that school is around the corner, it’s time to refresh your digital marketing strategy for your school, academy, or university. From experiencing a pandemic to entirely transforming a new academic environment for students and staff, the marketing and communications strategies that used to work for your district “pre-covid” may not work in this ever-changing 2021 environment. It is now the time to be pro-active, adaptive, and present to meet the increasing expectations of today’s families. 

Practice #1: Start a School Blog 

A school blog is a wonderful way to display the activities that students participate in and around the school. It’s also a great place to distribute advice and share the community’s voice. The blog will give outsiders an inside look on the programs and events that the students participate in. Connecting with the school’s community will emphasize how much the directors care about the students and faculty, while promoting conversation. It will also let more people organically find your school when searching for their children’s next academic steps. Overall, creating a blog will strengthen your school’s brand identity.  

Practice #2: Enhance the School’s Website 

Times are changing, and so should your website! Making an inadequately designed website and not thinking about the user’s experience will produce site traffic and static action. Like the director of Front Porch Marketing, Julie Porter states, “create a clean, user-friendly website.” This will increase the school’s reputation and lead to more engagement. Just remember to keep it simple to navigate and creative. An easy way to accomplish this is to rebrand logos, create a color scheme that seamlessly translates throughout all pages, and habitually update the navigation tabs.  

Practice #3: Make Social Media Accounts 

Posting on social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, create opportunities for parents and guardians to find your school organically. People can easily share, like, or comment on your posts to help create more popularity quickly. As your account grows, the more recognition and traffic your school develops. You can achieve this by devoting time into capturing professional videos and photos of events and activities.

A great example of this is with one of our clients, Faith Family Academy. As Christine Finnegan, our media relations director states, “be consistent will all messaging throughout your platforms.”  In addition, you can connect with your audience by responding to their comments and other members can add reviews.

Practice #4: Begin an Email Drip Campaign 

Emails are increasing in popularity due to people relying on the digital-sphere to stay in the loop. This upward trend in email reliability is the result of them being tailored to user preferences and behaviors. This personalization helps users see information related to their interests rather that unfavored topics that are being pushed upon them through advertising.

By asking current families and interested families for contact information via a survey or sign-up sheet, users can subscribe to an email list and look at automated content daily or weekly. This proves to be an easy strategy for reminding and promoting members of future academic and recreational events. Email workflows truly provide a personal touch to electronically reach each community member. 

Practice #5: Promote School Events 

Events, such as an open house, are a great way for newcomers to meet the faculty and staff. It also helps families understand if their values align with the school’s and if the school fits their expectations. Parents and guardians will also be given the opportunity to explore the campus for the first time.  

Additionally, back-to-school kickoffs are a wonderful way to understand what people personally look for in a school and its curriculum. Having organized school events with informational pamphlets to give out aids prospective families to secure their decision of coming to your school. Whether you share the events via social media or on the website, the end result allows you to increase engagement and nurture relationships with newly inquiring families.   

Conclusion 

The expectations of parents are higher than ever. It’s crucial that your school’s digital marketing strategy adapt alongside them. As the fall semester comes right around the corner, use these best practices to ensure that your digital marketing strategy is future-proofed.  

First of all, if you don’t know what a typewriter is, this blog probably isn’t for you. 

It’s for us old geezers who distinctly remember the clickety-click of “secretaries” creating paper office correspondence.

In fact, typewriters were once indispensable tools for practically all businesses.

So what happened? Why aren’t they around anymore? The answer is easy, right?

Technology. We’ve now entered the digital world. Fast forward to laptops, tablets and smart phones that empower paperless communications anytime from virtually anywhere. Duh, you say. What does that have to do with me?

Let’s take a lesson from our typewriting past, and apply it to our future. What seems absolutely critical in today’s business environment that’s going to be obsolete tomorrow? You know the answer – you just don’t want to say it out loud:

Paper.

It’s happening, friends, more quickly than you might imagine. Offices across all industries are conducting more business and storing more documents online.

Real life example: I had a root canal (joy) done more than a year ago. The endodontist’s office was digital – I sat in the waiting room at a laptop station for new patients and “filled out my paperwork” digitally. Crazy, huh? Well, not really.

Back to my point.

Where are you in your paperless journey? Is it even on your radar? Are you ahead of the game, or will you be pulling up the rear, kicking and screaming? If you’re not convinced you need to take action now, then let me hit you with a few impressive facts:

Environmental Impact

• According to reduce.org, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year.
• Conservatree.com has calculated it takes one tree to create 8,333.3 pages of paper.
• Thus, even a small office of 10 people would cost the environment about 12 trees per year.

Now let’s multiply that by the millions of workers in the U.S. I think a whole forest just disappeared. And that doesn’t even account for the negative impact of energy and greenhouse gasses used in paper production or its transportation to retailers and businesses.

Office Efficiency

Well-filed digital documents are easier to find than paper documents, thus saving time, reducing frustration and improving productivity. According to papersave.com:

• The average document is copied 19 times in its life.
• The average time it takes to fax a document is eight minutes.
• Professionals spend 20-30% of their day filing, searching and retrieving information but only 5-15% of their time reading the document.
• It costs companies $20 in labor to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.

Greater efficiency equates to a more streamlined business, which not only enhances profitability, but makes it easier to better satisfy customers.

Economics

• The costs of using paper in the office can run 13 to 31 times the cost of purchasing the paper, per reduce.org. That’s because for each sheet of paper used, a company also incurs costs for storage, copying, printing, distribution, postage, disposal and recycling.
• A survey reported by dentalproductsreport.com indicated that a fully digital dental office saves nearly $9,000 per year.
• On a bigger scale, Citigroup, determined that if each employee used double-sided copying to conserve just one sheet of paper each week, the firm would save $700,000 each year. KA-CHING!

Don’t let mounds of paperwork today get in the way of going paperless tomorrow. It can seem like a daunting task, but to move forward, to be competitive, to be a leader, you have to bite the bullet. It’s good for business, and it’s good for the environment. Just remember the ol’ Underwood typewriter, boxed up in the attic gathering dust …

Enough of my soapbox! Let’s talk about HOW you’re making the transition. Hit me up with your best ideas and let’s make this happen!