School Marketers: Read THIS Before You Set Next Year’s Goals

As the new year approaches, we encourage you to:

Go back to the why

If you aren’t clear on why each piece of the 2017 marketing plan matters, now is the time to figure it out. It’s not too late to adjust, reinvent or toss any ideas that don’t align with your ultimate vision.

Explore what worked this year…and what didn’t

Reflecting on your raging successes is fun. Reviewing your epic failures is not—but it’s equally important. Give both equal time in your mind. Grab your team and have an honest discussion about all of it.

Establish goals, assign tasks, create timelines

Goal-setting feels good, but too often the conversation centers around the dreams and never extends into the reality. For every goal you set, assign a project leader, establish a rough timeline, submit for budget approval—and do it NOW. If you don’t, students will be leaving for summer break and you’ll be wondering how you’re rolling the launch of your big ideas into another school year.

Create systems

Whether it’s a daily process for a repetitive task or a new way to keep yourself organized, you absolutely need to establish ways to keep yourself on track. The coming year will be as big, beautiful and hectic as the ones that have preceded it. Establish systems and processes so you can maintain sanity all year long.

As marketers, we’ve built our careers on an ever-changing field. Yes, our field is marketing, but it’s also a bit technology, sociology and psychology. We know that a new social network or a change in mobile phones can change how we do our jobs and where we focus. And we can’t exactly plan for that. But when we know our why, we know what works, we have realistic plans and the methods through which to achieve our goals, we become that much more unshakeable.