At the beginning of the year, we talked about setting goals. It’s only fitting that we circle back and discuss how to review your progress and evaluate your success! It sounds a little intimidating, but we promise it’s not as scary as you think. We’ll walk you through the entire process of reviewing your 2024 goals and helping you plan for 2025.
Your 2024 Goals
First and foremost, you’ll need to find your list of 2024 goals. If you typed them up on your phone, pull them up. If you created a vision board, get it off the wall and have it in front of you. You can talk about how well you did all day long, but you need the starting numbers to back it up.
You’ll also need any tracking documents you’ve kept up with. Any spreadsheet where you track followers or video performance is a must-have, and we also recommend having your profile to reference, too. Anything that will help you visualize your growth and see your successes.
Step 1. Review 📚
The first step is reviewing the goals you set for the year and where you ended up. Your goals should have been measurable, actionable, and time-bound, so you should be able to clearly see when you meet them. Sit down and look everything over. Make notes if you want! This first step is all about looking at the data and understanding the changes.
Step 2. Celebrate 🎉
No, you’re not done, but go ahead and celebrate any wins you have! Did you grow your followers? Was there an increase in your engagement rate? Did you make as many videos as you wanted? Congratulate yourself on anything you’ve done well this year.
Step 3. Compare ⚖️
Next, look at goals you didn’t quite meet. If you’ve got them on a spreadsheet, try highlighting them in a different color. Where did you start the year off, and where are you now?
It’s important to note that there’s no judgment in this portion of the review. You aren’t supposed to beat yourself up or wonder why you didn’t perform as well as you’d wanted to. Approach this as objectively as you can: you’re just trying to see what metrics you didn’t reach and why you didn’t reach them.
Step 4. Analyze 📊
Now that you know where you succeeded and where you need work, you can dive into the why. You’ll want to look for patterns in your posts. Did you post all your high-performing content at the same time or on the same day? Maybe your low-performing content was all in the same category. You may have seen a sudden spike in views or followers around the launch of a new content series.
This will take a lot of time, so get comfy! Make note of any patterns you see in your content. You might not find any in your search, which is fine, too. Just spend some time looking for any patterns or similarities that you can use for a new strategy.
5. Look Ahead 👓
Now the fun part begins: since you know how your 2024 goals panned out, what do you want to accomplish in 2025? You can continue improving on the goals you set last year, or create some new ones! We’ve got some recommendations for you.
- Grow your follower count – maybe even double it.
- Introduce content pillars or start creating for a new one.
- Increase your views by 10%, 25%, or even 30%.
- Connect with your followers and open a Group chat.
- Try getting into a new niche. Crafting community, anyone?
- Boost your engagement rate. Do some research into good growth!
- Go Live more often. Once a week is a good goal!
This is all about what you want to do; make a list of all you want to do and highlight the ones you like the most. Aim for five big goals you want to achieve, then five others you can do once you meet them.
6. Re-Strategize ✍️
This step is just steps four and five together. You know how your content from 2024 performed, which of your 2024 goals you met, and what you want to do in 2025. Now you can develop strategies for how you want to meet them.
We’ve talked about creating content strategies before, but we’ll give you a quick rundown. And yes, it’s another numbered list.
1. Establish Your Goals ✅
You’ve already accomplished step one. Know what you want to get done so you can plan accordingly.
2. Research ✅
Spend some time looking at creators in your niche – either ones you follow or new creators. What are they doing? What’s successful? What do you like? Even look outside of your niche for things you enjoy.
3. Understand Your Audience ✅
A big, often forgotten part of content creation is knowing what your audience wants. If you know which of your content performs well or gets high engagement, you’ve figured it out.
4. Develop ✅
Once you have this background information, you’ll develop a plan for how to target your audience. Essentially you’ll decide on the kind of content you post and how often you’ll post. If content performs well try introducing it into your strategy. Prioritize content your community likes. Think of ways you can share more content that does well or target new communities.
To read more on content strategies, check out this article!
7. Plan It 🗺️
The final step is to plan out how (and when) you’ll achieve your goals. Give your goals achievable deadlines and keep them in a place where you can easily see them. We also recommend sketching out a rough content plan! This can be planning out the first month of content you’ll create, outlining when you’ll introduce new kinds of content, or even jotting down some exact videos you want to make. If you plan to introduce new content pillars, definitely write all of them down and plan out the first few of each at this point.
We can hear you asking, “But what if I want to change my plans? What if I need more flexibility?” That’s fine! This content plan doesn’t have to be fixed and finite. You can script out a few videos or plan what you want to post, then adjust the actual dates to suit your needs. The main thing is having a plan. It’ll be easier to be creative and make content if you already have a few video ideas ready to go.
But those deadlines? You’ll need them to be pretty settled.
Now you have everything you need to create a killer content schedule and evaluate your 2024 goals. For more tips to help you set your 2025 goals, check out this article.