As the new year gets underway, it’s time to finalize marketing budgets, expand marketing teams, try out new technology, and incorporate lessons from 2025 into future decisions. That last part can be a little tricky, and success in the other three tasks depends on how well you can evaluate the previous year’s marketing performance.

Knowing if you’re using your marketing resources wisely can be difficult. There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. You might have trouble linking every piece of marketing material back to a sale, for one. The marketing department might have taken an ad hoc approach to marketing rather than an approach that develops campaigns designed to achieve particular strategic goals. A lack of clear goals also makes social media data difficult to evaluate.

In order to be effective, marketing has to be aligned with an organization’s strategy. When strategy is clear, evaluating past performance and setting new goals becomes easier. Here are some tips for evaluating what worked and what didn’t in 2025 and preparing yourself to come back even stronger in 2026.

Taking Risks

With a solid strategy and clear goals, taking a few risks and trying something new becomes a lot less scary. Obviously, there are risks and there are risks. Betting your whole budget on some wild, unproven idea is not a great risk to take. The kinds of risks you should be taking involve experimenting with new ideas, approaches, and technologies while always keeping your goals in mind.

Let’s say at the beginning of 2025 you decided to expand your content marketing efforts into podcasting. The way to give yourself a framework for taking risks is to think through your expectations, understand how a podcast would help you accomplish your goals, and plan an exit strategy if it doesn’t work out.

Now it’s the end of the year and you’re looking back to evaluate its effectiveness. Even if you didn’t begin 2025 with a clear strategy, you can still think strategically about what you wanted to achieve with that podcast (or any other marketing campaign). Which of your organization’s strategic goals could it have accomplished? Which points of the customer journey did it target? The answers to those kinds of questions will help you determine what metrics to measure success against.

Maybe, in the end, you decide it’s not worth the time and effort to continue. Was it all for naught? Not at all. You learned some valuable lessons, and you can put an exit strategy in place: you’ll turn those podcast scripts into blog posts or an ebook and you’ll clip the best bits to post on social media.

With a strategy in mind for the coming year, you can further refine those clips you want to use on social media or turn into blog posts to achieve specific goals, such as increasing awareness, generating leads, driving traffic to your website, signing up leads for consultations, or closing sales.

Any risk, whether the result was successful or not, is useful if you can glean lessons from it. Hold a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of a project or at the end of the year to debrief your team. Questions like “What did you think would work that didn’t?” and “What did you think wouldn’t work but did?” allow you to challenge your assumptions and grow your body of applied knowledge. The concrete knowledge you gain by challenging your assumptions will make future marketing efforts more effective.

Challenging Assumptions

In all areas of business, it’s important to challenge your assumptions about what works and what doesn’t. Best practices change, some foundational knowledge becomes obsolete, and approaches that used to work well become less effective as technology, economics, and consumer behaviors change. This is especially true in digital marketing. Most of your marketing probably happens online: email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, PPC ads. The rules about what gets seen and what doesn’t are constantly changing.

While most of your marketing fundamentals will remain more or less the same, your strategies and tactics must always be open to new knowledge and new approaches. Knowing which ones will work is even more difficult in digital marketing than in traditional marketing settings, as the algorithms that determine who, if anyone, sees your posts or website are opaque and always changing. What we think we know about “the algorithm” might rest on false assumptions. When you look back on what worked and what didn’t, consider how changes in social media, email, and search (both in terms of how platform owners determine who sees what and how users use these platforms) might affect your marketing strategy in the future.

Evaluating and Learning New Technology

At first glance, some new piece of technology might seem like the very thing you need to put out fires and increase productivity. Or it might seem completely useless. You won’t know unless you try it or you talk to someone you trust who has experience with it. This is another way that you have to challenge your assumptions and take risks. We often think we know something, but we don’t take time to think about why we think we know something. What knowledge or experience is our assumption based on? As with everything else, if you have a clear strategy and you know your goals, what you need out of a piece of technology becomes clearer.

For example, you might not need a CRM with every functionality under the sun, but if you’re making multiple social media posts per day to increase awareness, or you are sending out personalized email campaigns to segmented lists to generate qualified leads, you might look for a CRM with the automations that can help you achieve these goals. You might feel perfectly satisfied with your current system of spreadsheets and post-it notes, but if one of your goals is to grow as a business, you’ll need a system that can scale up with you and accommodate multiple users.

Approaching technology implementation strategically is more important than ever in the age of AI. It’s also more difficult than ever to find reliable, expert voices free from hype or doomerism. In Straight Talk: The No-Nonsense Guide to AI Adoption, Hill Management Group founder and CEO Andrea M. Hill brings you sober, evidence-based guidance on strategic AI adoption. You’ll want to check out the book, available at the link on the right side of this page (or at the bottom on mobile), before drafting an AI implementation policy in 2026.

Are You Writing This Down?

This whole process is a lot easier if you’ve been taking notes throughout the year. It’s almost impossible to remember everything you did and why you did it, and even major changes like those new email security protocols might slip your mind. When you’re thinking through some of the above questions, having well-organized notes detailing your thought processes and the major events of the year will give you context for your assessment of marketing performance.

Begin 2026 With Strategy

You can only assess something if you have criteria to evaluate it against. If your 2025 marketing wasn’t strategy-driven, you might struggle with determining its effectiveness. In 2026, we’re here to help you set out a marketing strategy that aligns with your business strategy. Set your goals, know your metrics, and plan campaigns aligned with strategy, and you’ll find yourself a year from now looking back with much clearer hindsight.