If you want to stay on top of your marketing goals, you don’t need to wait until the end of the year to know if you’re on track.
Aim for success by checking your performance in the middle of the year. This review guide will assist you in assessing your marketing efforts while providing you with valuable insights into your current marketing strategy.
Start Here: Review Your Strategic Plan and Goals
Reflection and analysis can help you identify what’s working for you and what’s not. By looking into your strategies, you can identify where you need to clarify, build, and refine your message. It also gives you an opportunity to mitigate any weaknesses you find.
Create a Tracker
Start with the strategic plan you made, if you have one. Look for parts where your objectives are indicated. Focus on the measurable ones and find relevant data and numbers for every one of those goals.
If one of your goals is to enhance your overall brand reach and awareness, you’d need to assess the success metrics you identified. It could be your PR placements, brand mentions, social media impressions, and more. If your goal was to boost your sales, you may consider generated opportunities and those influenced by marketing as your metric to success.
Create a tracker, maybe in a spreadsheet, and list down all the data you need. Now take this time to note the status of each item, you could classify them as: Complete, On Track, or At Risk.
For numbers, create a column indicating your measurable items, one column for your goals, and another indicating your current status. For example, if your goal is to generate 100 leads from your website, put 100 under your goal. If you’ve reached 80 leads, then put that under the item’s current status column.
Ask the Right Questions
Take this opportunity to step back and ask critical questions about your marketing endeavors. These questions will guide you better on your next steps. On your tracker, feel free to add a notes section where you can indicate new ideas to improve your performance.
Marketing Strategies
- “How closely have we followed our strategic plan up to this point of the year?”
- “What successful results have we encountered in Q1 and Q2 that we could work on further?”
- ” Which of the Ps of marketing – product, place, promotion, price, people, process –are contributing to our growth and which are limiting?”
Marketing and Sales
- “Why are people not choosing our services? Is it because of our prices, offerings, or timing?”
- “Are our clients and customers coming from any unexpected sources? Is it anything we can replicate?”
Specific Channels
- “How many referrals are we generating? Where are these referrals coming from?”
- “What are people saying in their reviews about us on Google, Facebook, and other sites?”
- “Are our customers asking us for any new services?”
Content
- “Are our marketing pieces enhancing our perception in front of our targets?”
- “Should we highlight our customer testimonials?”
- “Are there any success stories we should turn into case studies?”
These questions can help you set your expectations and lead you in the right direction of what to do next.
Listen: Find Out What Customers Are Saying
Customer insights should be at the heart of your marketing strategies. They know what they want and need best and listening to them will let you know what to improve.
Conduct and Read Surveys
The closest you can listen to customers and clients is through surveys. Huddle with your customer service and sales teams as they’re the experts in working directly with customers.
Find out what they like about your services and what they think can be improved. Through this method, you can directly know what you should work on in the coming months ahead.
Look for Online Reviews
Online reviews can empower people as it helps them make informed and well-thought-out decisions. It’s the same as finding a staffing firm to partner with!
Over 99.9 percent of customers read reviews when they purchase online. 77 percent of consumers said they consider the average star rating when reading reviews. Meanwhile, 52 percent don’t trust ratings unless they are accompanied by review content. This is based on a Power Reviews survey on The Ever-Growing Power of Reviews. ¹
If you’re looking to staff more people, know that reviews also matter to job seekers. According to a Glassdoor report, 86 percent of job seekers and employees look for company reviews and ratings to decide on where to apply for a job. ²
Reviews matter to your audience, so listen to them. These reviews not only inform your target people but you too. Know what they’re saying about you to understand what you can improve in your marketing strategies and services. You can also find reviews on Google, your social media pages, and job posting sites.
Related Reading: Let’s Get Personal! The Power of Personalization in B2B Marketing
Check Your Connection: Do a Social Media Audit
Your social media is where most of your audience gathers and connects with you. This space is important to your marketing strategies and should be consistently monitored and updated when necessary.
Look at Your Social Media Pages
Create a visual presentation and tracker of all your social pages. Include your profile pictures, cover photos, and bio or about section–everything that your audience will first see when they view your profile. If you have inactive pages, add them to your deck too.
Compare your pages to see if any of them no longer reflects your current brand. See if you need to update any assets or bio content. Maybe there’s a link that may land clicks on old pages that no longer exist. Take note of the changes you need to make to improve your social pages’ image.
For inactive pages, identify if you need to post new content or if you have to permanently delete them. You can also check if there are any new interactions with old posts or if there are any changes to your follower count.
Gather Follower and Content Analytics
It’s time to gather data for your accounts by exporting post-level data. For most accounts, you can export data for the last 12 months.
Do take note that some sites have their limitations. For example, with mobile Instagram insights, you can only access the analytics for the last 90 days. If that’s the case, you may want to make gathering Instagram analytics part of your monthly routine.
Identify Which Content Type Performed Best
Most platforms can tell you straight up which of your posts are top performing, such as YouTube Studio and Twitter. However, some analytics tools may not calculate the way you do with your metrics. The good thing is you can identify your top-performing content using data you can download.
Take note which of your posts did best. It’s good to take note of why they performed the best out of the many you created. You can identify the topic, content type, or messaging as the contributing factor.
Compare Your Results from Before
You can compare this mid-year data to the second half of last year. See if you successfully increased your website traffic, audience, reach, and brand engagement.
See how the past six months’ data measure against your key performance indicators (KPIs). This allows you to see how close you are to meeting your goals to know if there are any adjustments you should be making.
However, note that your KPIs may be different for each platform depending on the page’s audience size and your initiatives.
Understand Your Audience Metrics
You can know more about your audience by reviewing content metrics. This tells you how they responded to your campaigns and why they are engaging with some content and not others.
Did they shower you with likes, comments, and shares? Or did they give you the cold shoulder? It’s all about figuring out what makes them tick!
Some platforms may offer you more details about your audience. For example, take a gander at Business Suite which provides demographics and top locations for both Facebook and Instagram.
Related Reading: How to Make Content Marketing Metrics and Analytics Make Sense
Watch Out: Identify the Current Trends
Things in the marketplace, such as trends, can change very quickly. What worked well in the first quarter of the year may no longer attract your audience in the last half of the year.
Consider if any of these questions are relevant to your efforts:
- “What are the current trends affecting my customer’s lifestyles?”
- “What strategies are my competitors doing?”
- “Do we need to shift our strategies, services, or messaging to be highly competitive?”
- “Did anything unexpected happen in the last few months? How can we better prepare for these situations in the second half of the year?”
- “Are there any digital platforms changes that may affect our current strategy?”
- “Do we need to outsource our marketing efforts for the third quarter and beyond?”
Always be on the lookout. Understanding current and upcoming trends can make your marketing plan more flexible when sudden changes come up in the market.
Work Smarter: Address the Areas That Need More Work
The most important thing to do is to communicate with your team and improve your plans once you’ve gathered the necessary data.
If you realize all your plans are on track, then that’s great! You can then place some stretch goals to keep things moving forward. If you think you’re way off track, you may need to reanalyze your resources and efforts to know which ones you need to focus more on and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Gather Significant Data to Make Better Marketing Strategies
Doing a mid-year review is important as it can help you set smart marketing goals for the second half of the year. Get your team together and dive deep into the data pool. We’re talking about customer insights, social media buzz, and content results! This will give you the power to skyrocket brand awareness and boost customer loyalty.
Related Reading: Winning B2B Marketing Challenges in 2023
ALLIED INSIGHT CAN HELP YOU MEET YOUR MARKETING GOALS
We get it, running a business can be overwhelming. But fear not, we’re here to deliver strategic marketing innovation for you.
Allied Insight is a full-stack marketing agency that can provide you with proper marketing architecture to support your corporate initiatives today and onward. We offer services such as Complete Competitive Analysis, Brand Continuity & Design Assessment, and SEO Optimization.
Why wait? Get in touch with us today and let’s have a chat about your marketing objectives.
References
1 “Survey: The Ever-Growing Power of Reviews.” Power Reviews, www.powerreviews.com/insights/power-of-reviews-survey-2021/. Accessed 29 Jun. 2023.
2 “40+ Stats For Companies to Keep In Mind for 2021.” Glassdoor, www.glassdoor.com/employers/resources/hr-and-recruiting-stats/. Accessed 29 Jun. 2023.
