This is the time of year where marketing plans are left in the waiting room. There is a common business mantra each December: we will look at marketing strategy after the holidays. The problem is, by delaying work on your strategy, you start the first of the year with a delay that can set your marketing and sales back for weeks.

Marketing strategy is a very fluid business endeavor. I find that December is the perfect time to set your strategy for the first quarter and beyond. Why? For one, you are at the end of the year and can see what worked and what did not over the past year. I like to trace sales to marketing whenever we can make that distinction. Take a look at your sales success. Evaluate your sales in three categories: your biggest sales, your new sales and your continuing sales. How did marketing impact each of these three categories? Now take a look at the sales that got away from you. What big sales did you lose to your competition? Why did this happen? What could you have done differently to change the situation? This may be a marketing opportunity for you to send a different message to your prospects that would cause them to take another look at your products and services. Did you lose customers over the year? Why did this happen? This type of evaluation will tell you what you need to fix about your business to keep this from happening again. Whenever you make an adjustment to the way you do business, it is a marketing opportunity. New things that make a difference in the customer’s experience make for good marketing.

Another reason December is a good month to plan strategy is the holidays give us a good look at what is trending in marketing. The holiday shopping season takes place in a few short weeks. Pay attention to the methods that are working now and what is phasing out in marketing. What happens in the retail world between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a microcosm of what will happen in the broader business sense the rest of the year. For instance, have you noticed how much more is being sold online? Have you also noticed that which is not being delivered to a home address is being picked up outside a big box store. My wife has started shopping for groceries this way. She orders online and picks up the groceries in the parking lot… never entering the supermarket herself. Take a look at these trends and then discuss how you are going to adapt your business to meet the demands of a market that highly values their convenience.