Every year around the holidays there’s a little pocket of time where the emails slow down, the office is half empty, and there’s a bit of space for reflection. In just a week or two, our teams will be in full gear working towards the goals that we’ve set, so now is the ideal time to use that space to check in on our digital strategies for 2020, learn from what we did last year, and make sure that our plans are aligned to where we actually want to go.

The risk in reflection like this is that it’s so easy to wander down every path, overthink every goal and end up right back where we started, with more questions than answers. To counter that, we’ve put together 5 simple steps that we use with our clients. This system allows us to review the goals and plans that have been set, looking for improvements and adjustments without losing the core of what you built your strategy on in the first place.

Each step builds towards the next, and each one should produce real takeaways that you can share with your team.

2020 Digital Strategy Review

  1. Review cold hard data from last year

    2. How many people did you reach? How much did you spend? Did you grow your subscriber base? Hopefully you’ve been recording and reporting on these metrics throughout the year, and now is your chance to see the numbers as important parts of the much larger story.

  2. Call out 5 important celebrations

    3. These are different than simple wins because they can reflect an overall trend, an improvement over last year, a threat that you dodged, or a big goal that you hit.

  3. Call out 5 important lessons

    4. Lessons come in many forms. They could be useful failures and they could also be unexpected successes or ways that you changed up what you were doing. This is your opportunity to reflect on the bumps in the road and cement what you learned from them.

  4. Review your goals for 2020

    5. I’m making the assumption that your annual strategy has clear goals set for the year, so this is your opportunity to check back in on them now that you’ve had some time to let them sink in. Are they realistic? Do they matter? How could you improve on them with your renewed perspective?

  5. Schedule January

    6. Goals are just conversation until they’re on your calendar. What will you do this month to help make your 2020 goals happen, and when will you do it? Blocking out time to work on your goals makes them real.

If one of your personal goals is to develop your digital skills and knowledge, then we’d love to send you the Brief – it’s a weekly email that we send out that contains what’s happening in digital and social, what really matters, and why you should (or shouldn’t) care. The sign-up form is just below this article.

If you have any questions that we can help with, or if you could use some expert help with your 2020 digital strategy, please shoot us a message at hello@wearejunction.com.