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Do you ever find yourself in a constant pursuit of the “next big thing”? Often as marketers, we’re tempted to dream up more more more, especially when setting goals for the new year.

But sometimes, the most effective strategy to set yourself up for success is to embrace what’s already working, and that’s exactly how my team is approaching 2024.

As we head into the new year, we’re taking a deep dive into our measurement data and Google Analytics, leveraging what has proven successful in the current year to shape our approach in 2024, and I am convinced that this is the reason 2024 is going to be our most strategic, low-stress year YET.

So, Goal Digger, I hope you buckle up and get ready to join us on this journey of taking a data-driven and peace-filled approach to our 2024 marketing plan… Let’s get started!

The Focus For 2024

The biggest focus I want for next year is ease and alignment. Instead of flooding the market with a barrage of new offers, we’ve made the conscious choice to optimize what has already demonstrated its value! 

This is not only streamlining our efforts, but it also gives us more time to get into the nitty gritty details of the business, like search engine optimization, updating our web pages, and giving our audience a more seamless experience.

By focusing on what’s proven to work, we’re aiming for strategic growth with ease in 2024… and that’s what I want to help you do, too! Today, I’m going to share how we’re using this year’s data and our personal experiences to ‘rinse and repeat’ what’s working and get rid of what isn’t.

You’ll notice this has been a bit of a “theme” for the podcast over the last month – I recorded two episodes recently about this, Unpopular Opinion: You Don’t Need More Offers and If You Want Bigger Results, You HAVE To Do This, both aligning with this same message that more isn’t always better… especially when it comes to maintaining your sanity while running a business.

Let me walk you through the 5 main initiatives we’re focusing on and help you understand how you can apply these ideas to your own business goals and plans!

1. Plan for Ease Up Front 

I recently heard a quote that was something like, “Instead of asking yourself if you worked hard enough to deserve rest, what if you asked yourself: did I get the right amount of rest to do my best work?” 

Something I think we did well this year (but we can always improve on) is planning in advance for rest for me and my team. There are 3 ways my team and I are planning for more ease and rest in 2024:

• Back in October of 2023, I announced two different planned vacations we are taking off as a team next year. This is in addition to the regular PTO my team is encouraged to take, because it is so important to me that everyone on my team has a life outside of work! So we’re already blocking out some black out dates for our team – this also protects my time away so that no one is working and I don’t trick myself into working because the team is on. 
• Next year, we are not doing any launches in the summer. This past year, we had my email marketing course, the List to Launch Lab launch in the middle of the summer and although it was a super successful launch, I just made a note that I don’t want to launch in the summer again. Now that me and a lot of my team members have kids who are out of school during that time, summer is a busy time that feels a bit more like you’re in survival mode! 
• We’ve also decided to keep the four day work week into 2024. If you remember, I recorded an episode back in August about how my team is doing a 4 day work week experiment, and that I would update you later on how it went. Well, here’s your update… it’s going SO well! Everyone on the team is feeling really good about having a flexible Friday–whether that means they spend time preparing for the week ahead, taking a day to themselves, or with friends and family. 

2. One Launch Per Quarter

I haven’t created a new program in over 3 years, we’re just always making things better and spending our energy on serving our clients with the BEST content instead of creating new content all the time. 

To piggy-back on planning for rest, we’ve decided that our team will be doing one launch per quarter (except for in the summer), because this schedule is really feasible for us. It feels really good for our team to only have to focus on one launch every 3 months because it gives us the downtime we need to plan, prep, and refresh our offers and marketing efforts before sharing them with our audience. 

I used to plan quarterly and I loved that approach but one thing I found when we did that is that we worked a little more urgently and we would try to cram too much into a quarter. 

We’ve actually already mapped out the entire year’s worth of launches, and I LOVE the schedule we have planned… I bet you will, too! To help you plan out your year, download the FREE printable Goal Digger Planner!

3. Prioritize Affiliate Marketing

This year, we doubled our affiliate marketing revenue from 2022 and we want to continue partnering with our affiliates to align on some of their launches. 

In the past we never had a dedicated affiliate director on our team, it was really just a collaborative effort to mix affiliate strategy into our own promo but when one of my tea members, Marisa, mentioned her love for affiliates and a desire to cut down on work hours as a mom, we shifted her role. Now, she manages all of our affiliate partnerships!

So, although we won’t be launching any of our own stuff in the summer, that’ll likely be when we’re focusing on affiliate promotions. These are lighter ‘lifts’ for the team, because they don’t require us to run any of our own campaigns – typically, when we promote affiliates, we send out 1-2 emails, post a few stories and reels on Instagram, perhaps release a podcast episode interviewing the founder, and set up a chatbot integration for it. 

Since we were discussing the concept of ‘rinse and repeat’ earlier, this is the perfect example of that… our team has affiliate marketing down to a T now, so partnering with companies we are affiliates for is a perfect way for us to increase revenue in the summer months when we aren’t launching our own offers. I recently recorded an episode all about how we are promoting our affiliate partners, Episode 722: Hearing About Affiliate Marketing? Here’s Everything You Need to Know.

4. Plan Content in Advance

Something we started to do this year and we want to get even more strategic with in 2024 is choosing weekly and monthly themes for our content to make content creation a bit easier from a creative standpoint.

These themes will typically align with our launches during the months we have them (such as focusing on podcasting when promoting The Podcast Lab or Pinterest when sharing about The Pinterest Lab).

But during the ‘off’ months which is like 90% of the year, when we don’t have any launches, there have been times when I look at my phone every day with nothing to say… 

So choosing a weekly ‘theme’ and planning content in advance, knowing what’s coming up and what the goal is, has been really helpful for my brain. 

This also helps followers see what you’re about and understand what’s available for them with a simple little scroll. I highly recommend trying this out for yourself!

5. Plan For Optimization

I recently recorded an episode about going deeper not wider with your offers and audience which means we’re really focusing on strategy and optimization and not necessarily newness. Check out Episode 724: Unpopular Opinion: You Don’t Need More Offers!

Focusing on some of the things no one will see but we will feel/experience including search engine optimization, exploring what YouTube could look like for my brand, getting new branding done across the board, and continuing to work with our measurement team.

You can hear more about how we’re tracking our business results in last week’s Episode 726: If You Want Bigger Results, You HAVE To Do This!

One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear, who stands by the fact that if you can improve by 1% each day, you will be 37 times better after a year. Slow and steady wins the race!

Looking at making small improvements whether it’s in conversions, traffic, subscribers and seeing how we can go deeper on what’s working instead of going wider. Diluted efforts produce diluted results so we’re really looking at focused efforts! 

So friend, here’s your reminder: do NOT be afraid to experiment and to devote some time and energy to trying some of the things you want to see happen for 2024 NOW, so you’re not hitting January 1st in a panicked state!

Now It’s Your Turn!

Strategy and ease… those are the names of the game for my team in 2024. I want to point out that if peace and ease is your goal for the next year, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be lazy… it means you’re going to set yourself up for success by being strategic with the data and experiences you have from last year!

I am a huge fan of tracking mine and my team’s efforts and then making decisions based on the numbers (and how we feel!) afterward. This is how we’re approaching 2024… and now it’s YOUR turn! 

Download the FREE printable Goal Digger Planner to help you strategically plan your year with ease!

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