How to Write a Year-in-Review Blog Post

‘Tis the season of Hallmark movies, ugly sweater parties, and the corporate blogging version of Christmas cards: year-in-review posts. Looking back on your company’s year to share highlights can be an excellent way to reinforce your brand story and engage your customers. It can also be easily lost in the holiday posting frenzy. Here are five ways to make your year-in-review blog post stand out and tell the right story.

Use Images or Infographics to Tell a Richer Story

We all know the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, and yet corporate blogs often miss out on an opportunity by using a generic branded image that tells no story at all.

When consulting firm McKinsey wrote its 2020 year-in-review post, the team used a scrollable, image-heavy format that beautifully highlights its work and main themes of the year. It reads more like an infographic than an article, which makes it easier to scroll, but articles are linked throughout for those who want more.

Atlassian provides another example of a highly visual year-in-review post, with colorful infographic images that can easily be shared on social media.
Speaking of visuals: if you want to get even more creative, video is an excellent way to stop the scroll: Salesforce’s FY2021 year-in-review video combined news clips, customer and employee interviews, and eye-catching videography.

Lead With Your Customers

It’s never a bad time to show some gratitude, but especially if you’re posting in the month of November, give thanks for your clients and the important work they do. Workplace communication company Slack highlighted successes in their year-end blog and thanked their customers for trusting them with a heartfelt video.

Videoconferencing giant Zoom saw explosive growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, and naturally highlighted the ups and down of an extraordinary year in their year-in-review blog post. But immediately from the first lines, the author wrote about the people and companies using their product to keep the world running.

As author Michele Bailey writes in The Currency of Gratitude, “Delivery of excellent customer service combined with expressions of gratitude for customer loyalty are powerful motivators for continuing your business relationships.”

Give Actionable Insights

The folks at Adobe wrote a year-in-review post highlighting creative trends on Adobe Stock in 2020. It features the company’s software and is a good example of the above principle of telling the customer’s story by sharing user images. But what’s especially compelling is that it offers interesting insight and analysis into creative trends.

As a bonus, this approach is also a good PR move: journalists love a solid trends or data story, so offering new information gives you an opportunity to place thought leadership content.

Another way to offer useful information is by compiling the best resources of the year. One MuleSoft writer shared an API Strategy year in review that summarizes and links to several helpful whitepapers and studies. The post contains actionable insights for executives thinking about strategy for the year to come, and now they have a good reason to click through and read the linked content.

Focus on Results

Business legend Clayton Christensen’s jobs theory, which he first described in 2006, invites us to ask, “What job is our product hired to do?” A year-in-review blog post can be an exercise in “interviewing” your product or service for the job your potential customers would hire it to do.

What would this look like? Start with brushing off your interview techniques. The STAR method can help tell the story of how your team overcame challenges or rose to the occasion with the following framework:

Situation: set the situation and give necessary context
Task: explain what your team’s role was in the situation
Action: describe specific steps you took to address it
Result: share specific outcomes and results  —  hard numbers are especially illustrative

For example, cybersecurity startup Detectify started off 2020 fresh from a €21 million funding round for its ethical hacker network. Detectify's year-in-review blog focuses heavily on how it used that momentum to build success, citing numbers and results.

The team also included a highly-visual graphic showing key stats for its Detectify Crowdsource offering that highlights its growth in membership, usage, and features.

Tell a Story With Heart

There’s nothing wrong with admitting your organization faced challenges —  in the midst of a global pandemic, a company pretending that they are completely unaffected would appear out of touch. But owning that story can help strengthen your brand image.

Take for example how Comma Copywriter’s own founder and president, Crystalee Beck, took the opportunity to share behind-the-scenes struggles and lessons learned in addition to the highlights reel for her 2020 year-in-review blog post.

The blog highlights events, milestones, and quantifiable successes (growth in the company’s online presence, number of employees, and client volume), but what is most compelling is the founder’s honesty about lessons learned. The vulnerability serves to illustrate the company’s commitment to building a balanced workplace culture, and it helps tell the brand’s story.

As small business consultant Jeffrey Shaw writes in Entrepreneur, this is how a company builds trust: “It’s creating the connection where trust is granted because the customer feels the why, the mission, the heart, and the soul behind the business and responds by thinking to themselves, ‘It’s no wonder this is why you do what you do.’”

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