Introduction
Imagine turning a simple yearly recap into a story that grabs attention and connects with your audience. A great Year-in-Review isn’t just about looking back at the past year. This is the perfect content type to celebrate wins, build trust, and get everyone excited for what’s next. Whether it’s for customers, employees, or stakeholders, it’s the perfect way to strengthen relationships.
In this blog, we show you how to create an engaging Year-in-Review and share examples to inspire your own!
What is a Year-in-Review?
Let’s start with the basics. A Year-in-Review summarizes the key events, achievements, milestones, and challenges of the past year. Companies share it with customers, stakeholders, or employees to showcase progress, celebrate successes, and outline future goals.
You can use it to highlight, for instance, new product launches, new team members, revenue performance, or customer success stories. This is also the perfect moment to offer a sneak peek of what’s coming next year to keep your audience excited.
Year-in-Review: A powerful customer marketing tool
When it comes to customer content the Year-in-Review is a powerful tool in your customer marketing strategy. By highlighting your successes, you’re showing your customers that they made the right choice by choosing you. This is already a great tool to shed light on your customers’ successes, not only yours. Putting them first is a great way to show them that you’re proud of what they achieved with your support.
Don't forget, a Year-in-Review isn’t just about the past. It’s about building excitement for the future. It’s your chance to say, “We achieved so much together in 2024, and we’re ready for even bigger things in 2025!”
It’s a simple way to show customers you value their journey and are committed to helping them achieve more.
How to structure a captivating Year-in-Review
Creating an impactful Year-in-Review starts with smart content planning. Here’s how to make your Year-in-Review shine:
- Define your purpose: Decide what you want to achieve. Are you celebrating team successes, building customer loyalty, or showcasing your brand value? Or all of the above? All are good, but remember that the clearer your objective, the better your content.
- Tell a story: Data without context can feel quite dry. Spice things up with storytelling: share customer testimonials, team highlights, or success stories to make your digital annual report more personal and engaging.
- Make it visual and interactive: Static PDFs are outdated. Use infographics, videos, or animations to keep your audience engaged. Using an interactive content format like Foleon can really improve your interaction with your audience.
- End with a Call-to-Action: You should always finish your Year-in-Review with purpose. Include a CTA to drive engagement, such as contact forms or embedded calendars to guide your audience to the next step.
Year-in-Review template
When it comes to creating engaging Year-in-Review reports you should consider using modern content creation tools like Foleon. Your audience doesn’t want endless text.
Use interactive formats like responsive layouts, animations, videos, or visual storytelling. With Foleon, you can include anything to make your annual report engaging, including personalization to make sure the content you are sharing actually resonates with your audience.
Pssst: That’s not all… While content engagement is important, you’ll want to track it. You can do this with Foleon’s content marketing analytics. Gathering this data is key to creating a high-performing Year-in-Review campaigns. This will also help you refine your approach for next year.
3 Year-in-Review examples to inspire you
Looking for inspiration or even proof that a Year-in-Review is exactly what your business needs?
We chose 3 examples of high-performing campaigns that make these companies stand out from the crowd!
1. Spotify Wrapped: Personalization at scale
Of course, we couldn’t mention Year-in-Review without mentioning Spotify’s Wrapped campaign. They managed to create a cultural phenomenon, giving users a fun, unique recap of their year in music. Its bright visuals and playful tone make it highly shareable, keeping users engaged and connected to the brand.
In terms of results, Spotify Wrapped 2024 broke records with 2.1 million mentions in 48 hours and 400 million TikTok views in just 3 days. Spotify saw their app engagement jump by 40%, with 10.5M users sharing their summaries, making it the most impactful Wrapped yet.
Takeaway: When crafting your Year-in-Review, use personalization to center it around your audience. When they feel seen and valued, they’ll share your content and keep coming back.
2. Adidas 2023 Report: Transparency meets design
Adidas’s 2023 Year-in-Review isn’t just a showcase of achievements; it’s a statement of brand purpose. By focusing on sustainability milestones and future goals, Adidas aligns its brand with values that resonate with its target audience. By sharing revenue data, Adidas adds even more trust and reliability to its brand.
Takeaway: Use your Year-in-Review to communicate purpose and build trust. You can easily inspire confidence by showcasing the challenges you’ve experienced instead of only communicating the wins. This will make you appear genuine and inspire confidence.
3. Differentiated’s Art & Science 2024: Where creativity meets data
You need to engage your audience if you want your Year-in-Review to stand out. This is exactly what Differentiated’s Art & Science 2024 Year-in-Review does. Their report, created with Foleon, uses bold visuals, sleek layouts, and engaging elements such as an embedded interactive welcome video to guide their audience through the report. Mind blowing!
Takeaway: Differentiated’s use of Foleon allowed them to transform data into a visually stunning and interactive story. Always remember that combining design, storytelling, and actionable insights can make your Year-in-Review both engaging and empowering for your audience.
Discover: The Best B2B Marketing Campaigns
Foleon’s Year-in-Review 2024
At Foleon, we drink our own champagne. While our Year-in-Review Docs have always been engaging, for our 2024 Year-in-Review, we took things to the next level.
By using our personalization tool, each customer received their own Year-in-Review, showcasing for instance:
- How many documents they created
- How many active users engaged with the platform
- And more personalized highlights!
By connecting on a deeper level with our audience, our personalized Year-in-Review reached a conversion rate of 5.26%. That’s a 168% increase compared to the generic version sent at the same time!
This personalized approach not only demonstrated the value they achieved with Foleon but also highlighted how they could leverage our tools even further. It’s a game-changer for building stronger relationships and celebrating shared success.
Wrapping it up on the Year-in-Review topic
A Year-in-Review is more than just a recap; it’s a tool for connection, inspiration, and loyalty. By combining storytelling, visual appeal, and interactivity, you can create content that stands out and resonates. Try Foleon’s template to make your Year-in-Review memorable!
Ready to get started? Create a Year-in-Review your audience will love!