My Weekly Marketing

Planning for the New Year - Part Two

• Janice Hostager • Season 1 • Episode 86

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In this episode, we're diving into part two of our 2025 planning series. We start by mapping out a strategic roadmap for the new year, setting ambitious revenue goals, and building resilience into our businesses. If you haven't listened to part one, where we reflected on 2024 and realigned our visions, be sure to check it out. Here, we'll talk about practical steps like organizing your annual calendar, setting quarterly focuses, and planning for unexpected challenges.

We're also going to discuss the importance of deep work and how to schedule it into your busy life. Learn tips for creating effective promotions, setting realistic revenue goals, and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success. Whether you're planning a major product launch or looking to streamline your operations, this episode is filled with actionable advice to help you tackle 2025 with confidence. Plus, be sure to grab your free download of the Ultimate 2025 Planning Guide, packed with tools to help you make the most of your year. Listen in and set the stage for a standout year ahead!

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Janice Hostager:

I'm Janice Hostager. After three decades in the marketing business and many years of being an entrepreneur, I've learned a thing or two about marketing. Join me as we talk about marketing, small business and life in between. Welcome to My Weekly Marketing.

Janice Hostager:

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of My Weekly Marketing. Today's episode is part two of our 2025 planning series. In part one, we reflected on 2024 and realigned our visions. Now it's time to get tactical. Today's episode is all about creating a roadmap for the new year, setting revenue goals and building resilience into your business so you can tackle 2025 with confidence. First off, I really want to encourage you to go back and listen to episode 85, if you haven't already. In that episode, I talk all about what the numbers you should be looking at from 2024, what goals you met and didn't meet, and the reflections you needed to do before diving into our new 2025 year. So go do that right now and then come back to this episode, where we'll take the next step and map out 2025. Ready? Okay, great, okay.

Janice Hostager:

Step one: the big picture. I like to order one of those giant full year calendars for my wall. You know the kind that you can write on with erasable markers. I like them because they are erasable and, as we all know, things can and will change. They're also cool because I get those smaller post-it notes, like the ones that are like an inch and a half by I don't know an inch, two inch, I don't know, I'm terrible with measurements; the small post-it notes, anyway, they fit exactly on those squares, which makes planning also much easier. So then, the first thing I do with this giant erasable calendar is I write in any planned events, so that's holidays and vacations, anything else that are like the big rocks on the calendar, right, the things that you know that are coming up, that absolutely you need to plan around or take time off for. This is something that I learned the hard way. My husband is more of a homebody, but I need getaways, especially after tough weeks. I know that if I don't plan those vacations in advance, they likely won't happen or we'll be trying to shoehorn an event in on a too tight calendar. These can always be changed later, but scheduling them now is smart, especially after times that I know will be busy, like after a launch or a big promotion or just a busy time of year. If you're just starting out or you're launching new products, make sure you leave additional time in the front end to complete that program or just to do the launch, and I'll talk more about that later.

Janice Hostager:

It's also sometimes important to find time to do some deep work. I know people who plan getaways to hotels just to get some time to do that deep writing, or before launching a course, or putting a course together. In fact, since I have a home office with lots of interruptions from email, from phone calls, from my dog Daisy who goes ballistic when the UPS comes to the door, or even the environment in my office. I need to get away somewhere to do some deeper work. Honestly, I have a stack of books waiting to be read, a stack of papers, my planner all of these are distractions. So, starting in December of this year or next month when I'm recording, after I'm recording this, I have booked an off-site office space at Regis Office Centers where I get 10 private office days each month for less than the price of a night in a hotel. Honestly, it was a pretty good deal. Plus, I have locations in every major city worldwide, actually, and in airports, which makes them great when I travel, because sometimes you just need to get into a place where there are no distractions so that you can focus on what you have to do. Okay, so that's a bit of an aside, but my point is make sure you build time in for deep work if that's part of what you have to do in 2025. And then you can add that on your big calendar as well.

Janice Hostager:

Okay, step two: the quarterly planning framework. So start with quarter one. So what's the big focus for January through March? Is it launching a new product? Building your email list? Look at your revenue goal for each year and break that down into quarters as well, then determine how you're going to reach that goal each quarter through a launch or promotion. Okay, so after you've got that figured out, then you go into the monthly plan and break down your big goals into actionable steps for each month. For example, you might need to run ads to build your email list if you have a launch coming up the next month. Or you may need to reach out to podcasters to schedule appearances if you have a book launching in a couple months.

Janice Hostager:

Next, I want to give you some examples of how I've done it so that you can really see how much detail I'm talking about here. In spring of 2025, I'm planning on launching my new course called Modern Marketing Mastery. I'll talk about that a little later, but what I want to make sure is that I had everything on the calendar for that launch. So I'll start with a small beta launch and then I'll launch it again in the fall. What I'm doing first is to mark the dates that the promotion ends and then back up from there and include everything that I need to do for that promotion. So it was a detailed monthly breakdown. Not only did I put the date that the promotion ends and then I backed up and said, okay, when are the webinars going to be? When do the first emails go out? And try to get as specific as possible with regards to timing so that you start soon enough so that you're ready for launch day. The first time you do promotion is the toughest, since you're creating everything from scratch, but in subsequent promotions you'll know more about what you need to do and you'll have saved everything from the last time. So you won't need to go out as far with your promotion as you do when you're just creating everything for the first time. And as a side note, it's really helpful to do a debrief right after a promotion so that you remember the details about what worked and what went wrong, because something always goes wrong. Notes are so helpful in these situations, since there's always things that we don't remember and we think we will, but we don't. So I even include time on the calendar for that debrief after a promotion ends, so I don't forget to do it or I leave time to make sure it's done. But anyway, in my book, the secret to happiness is less chaos, and planning things out in advance makes that possible.

Janice Hostager:

Step number three: set revenue goals that actually work. First of all, know your numbers. As we talked about earlier, setting an annual revenue goal and breaking it down by quarter and month is a really good way of doing it. Look at your revenue from last year and ask how can you improve on that? You may want to include a hairy, scary goal. I love what authors Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy say in their books; 10x is easier than 2x. Their premise is that when you focus on really big goals, you're more likely to rethink everything about how to get there. A goal that's only two times what you're currently doing is likely one that you're going to only do a few things different and that won't yield the bigger result. It's similar to the quote good is the enemy of great. So come up with a goal that's much bigger than you think you can reach and try this out. You may not reach the stars, but you may land on the moon, which is higher than you would have otherwise. Next, map products to revenue. If your goal is $100,000, how many of each product or service do you need to sell to hit that goal? Do that for each of your products or services in each quarter.

Janice Hostager:

Then, as I mentioned earlier, plan for the promotions. When will you promote them? Schedule these in at least general terms on your calendar so that you're ready for them. Okay, ready for step four: Plan for the unexpected.

Janice Hostager:

The phrase life will throw you a curveball is 100% true, and in business, I've learned to expect the curveballs. So when planning for the year, think about doing a few things like buffering your budget. So setting aside cash reserves for slow months or unexpected expenses is a really smart idea. Those things will happen, I guarantee it. And curveballs aren't just about finances. Streamline your systems to save energy too. So what I mean by that is automate repetitive tasks to free up your energy for growth, and save copies of everything you do in a file system like Google Drive so that you don't have to recreate the wheel every time you do a promotion. It's easy to rinse and repeat anything you've already done that's worked well and improve what didn't.

Janice Hostager:

And then something that I know we entrepreneurs overlook, and that is self-care. Self-care is a strategy. Burnout is the enemy of progress. Schedule breaks and delegate wherever you possibly can. Plan those vacations in advance, like I talked about at the top of the episode, so you're fresh and ready to grow your business. Also, in episode 85, we did some self reflection about what went well and what didn't. Where were your big stressors in 2024? Identify those biggest stressors and think about ways you can reduce or eliminate them in 2025.

Janice Hostager:

Okay, moving on to step five: measuring success. What gets measured gets managed. You can measure success by tracking your KPIs, or key performance indicators, to monitor your growth. Now, there are a ton of KPIs you could track, and not all of them are going to be important to your business, so I'm just going to list a few of these that you could be tracking. I put a list of these, along with the formulas for how to figure them out, in my 2025 planning guide, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes, too, or you can go to janicehostager. com/ 2025.

Janice Hostager:

One thing I don't want you to do is to get bogged down with all of these, so be specific and follow only those that tell the story about how each of those areas is doing. For example, I like to stress the customer lifetime value metrics so that you know exactly how much you can afford to spend when you're paying for ads or anything on your marketing, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed or hyper-focused on the things that don't matter as much for you. Right now, in your stage of business, it's super easy to get lost in the weeds with all these. Okay, so here are some KPIs that you could track. Number one your financial KPIs. These I do recommend tracking, since they'll determine what you'll do in other aspects of your business and it's super important just to keep your business running, and that is a profit margin, cash flow, customer acquisition cost and the lifetime value of your customer. Like I said, I'll put all of these in my free download and along with the formulas on how to figure them out.

Janice Hostager:

The second thing to track, of course, is marketing KPIs, your website traffic, your landing page conversion rates and your overall marketing return on investment. You'll also probably want to track email marketing metrics such as your open rate, your click-through rate and your unsubscribe rate, and social media engagement. You need to know what's working, and the only way to know is to measure it. Okay, the third thing to track in your KPIs are your sales, and this should be easy one to track, because you probably are paying quite a bit of attention to it anyway. But we want to track recurring revenue, new revenue and anything to do with sales. Then customer KPIs. So what's your customer retention rate and your return rate, especially if you have a membership?

Janice Hostager:

Next would be your operational KPIs, and what I mean there is. I'm talking about, like, employee productivity. That may not be an issue for you if you don't have employees or if you outsource your employees, but for some businesses, employee productivity really shows up in their bottom line. So you want to make sure and track that. Number six, personal and team KPIs. This is similar to number five, except we want to focus, too, on employee satisfaction. Are they happy in their jobs and is your and their work-life balance good? Is your team taking their vacations? Are you, and what feedback are you getting from them? A happy and refreshed staff makes a healthy business. And the seventh and last KPI which I encourage tracking is your sustainability and growth KPIs, so that is, new product and service launch success and customer feedback and return rates for your products.

Janice Hostager:

Once you've determined what's important for your business to track, set a date at the end of each quarter to reflect on what's working and adjust what isn't. For myself and I do this for my fractional CMO clients, I put a date on the calendar every month to track the relevant KPIs. I found that if I don't put it on the calendar, it doesn't get done, so I highly encourage you to put it on your calendar every month. Okay, so that's a wrap of our 2025 planning series. Whether you're crushing it already or starting from scratch, the key to a great year is being intentional. Now it's your turn to take this framework, put it into action and make your 2025 your best year yet.

Janice Hostager:

I'll include a bunch of links for you to help you find anything I talked about in the show notes for today. So go to myweeklymarketing. com forward slash 86, and that will take you right to them. Also, you've heard me say it many times, but if you liked this episode, I'd really appreciate it if you would just take a minute or two and leave a review for me on iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. That will help me reach even more people with all of my episodes, and so I just created a link. If you go to myweeklymarketing. com forward slash review, it will take you directly to iTunes where you can rate me and leave a review if you wish. It would mean so much to me. So thank you in advance for that, and also thanks for joining me today. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

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