Reviewing Marketing Activities for 2021
How do you ensure that your staff are performing to the best of their abilities? What processes do you have in place for supporting employees to improve their performance or add new skills? In most companies a system of regular (often quarterly or yearly) performance reviews and more regular informal check-ins with line managers ensures that employees are supported and that any performance issues are managed before the situation affects the overall productivity of the workplace.
It's no different for your marketing activities – regular reviews and yearly audits ensure that your marketing strategies are still working for you. We can consider marketing activities to be an employee because in many ways, they are. Your marketing activities are supposed to be working for you, bringing in sales and improving your reputation at the very least. Why would we expect to be able to leave our marketing activities unchecked for months at a time and still expect them to be performing to their best?
If you don't already have a review system in place, start by looking at the past year as a whole. The first thing you need to determine is what your marketing goals are, and this shouldn't be hard. Your marketing goals are, put simply, what you hoped to achieve from your marketing activities. Increasing sales is the most obvious and most important, but were there reputation building goals too? What about recruitment or new product feedback? Think carefully about everything you wanted your marketing to do for you.
Calculating the return on investment (ROI) is the second important step. Work out how much each activity cost you (per month for some activities, like paid adverts, and per quarter for organic marketing activities like posting a blog or organic SEO strategies).Working out exactly how many sales you can attribute to each activity can be trickier; compare your sales data with your marketing data to identify spikes in sales that came in the week or two after a specific campaign to get an idea.
Next, analyse which of your marketing activities helped you meet your goals the best. If you identify any activities which haven't had a significant impact consider suspending the activity for a few months to see what impact this has on sales. You may need to restart that activity, or be able to cut it completely and channel that money towards the more effective strategies you have. This analysis will tell you what is worth continuing with, and where more investment could bring higher returns as well as what you can drop.
If this is a brand new exercise for you then you will also benefit from conducting a quick marketing review every quarter. When it's time to conduct your yearly audit the data you collect and analyse at these interim reviews will be invaluable in working out what makes the grade, and what gets cut. This exercise can feel like a lot to take on, but don't feel overwhelmed because we're here to help you get your marketing to perform as your best employee. We can help you audit and review your existing marketing strategy while getting new techniques and campaigns off the ground with our wealth of knowledge and experience.
The best thing is that once you're in the habit of regularly reviewing your marketing strategies with the experts it will become second nature, and you'll identify things that aren't working before you've pumped too much budget into them. As with any new task, the more you do it the easier it gets and it's the same for conducting marketing reviews. Schedule yours now at the same time employee reviews are due, and pick up this great habit for 2022.
