It’s tempting to glide though the occasional slow work days of this holiday season, doing the bare minimum to be (look?) productive. Then, January 4th hits and wham! we rocket into gear. We get demands from all sides and feel behind before the first work week of the new year is complete.

I think now is a great time to mindfully review the current year’s work and make some plans for the upcoming year. We often move so quickly through our daily tasks we don’t have time to actually think.

Here are 5 ideas you can do now to get ahead before the new year even starts:

1. Update results from your recent email/telemarketing/social media/mail campaigns in a single marketing plan. Any surprises? What can you test for next year? Efforts you can shift in your campaign? List them in an Excel or Google doc now, when fresh in your mind.
2. Spend some time browsing your competitors’ websites. How are they capturing new visitors, renewing people? What demographic information are they collecting?
3. Spend more time online looking at websites of brands that you admire. What ideas or techniques can you borrow for your own brands?
4. Research one marketing channel that you don’t know well but are interested in trying next year. A few examples might be paid social media, re targeting ads, applying data analytics, and implementing more automated (drip) marketing techniques.
5. Learn more about your current vendors’ capabilities that you might not be using now. It’s possible you can get more out of your current providers…at no or low cost.

If you do even one these things it will spur ideas, invigorate your workday, and hopefully end up expanding your capabilities, knowledge and experiences.

Plus, it can be invigorating to change up our everyday routine.

The journey continues.

C