As we prepare to close out the second quarter, it’s time to reflect on how well your marketing is working. Are you achieving what you set out to achieve? Or are you left with big goals for the year that you’re far from achieving?
This is a good time to reflect, adjust, and refocus your marketing to meet your annual goals. Here’s a look at what you should do to audit your marketing efforts to date and update to improve your strategy to meet your goals.
Why Conduct a Mid-Year Marketing Assessment
Marketing is about testing, analyzing data, and adjusting to create the best connection with potential and existing customers. While research may show that one message will work best, you may find that it resonates differently across different channels.
But you won’t notice a difference in how your message resonates unless you take the time to fully evaluate it.
A mid-year review is similar to what you present at your annual meeting to show your management how well your marketing and plans for the new year are working. Only it’s a shorter period of time, and you’ll be planning for the next six months rather than the next year.
Your company can reap these significant country email list benefits from a mid-year marketing assessment.
- Provides time to implement changes and improve ROI before the end of the year.
- You can get ahead of your competitors while they are in summer mode and working during their vacations.
- You will have a better understanding of how you are performing and will be able to provide reports to your management.
- This gives you the opportunity to re-engage potential customers before the lead goes cold.
- Waiting too long to adapt can cause your capabilities in certain areas to disappear.
- This provides an opportunity to re-engage and energize your marketing staff to achieve your goals.
What does a mid-year marketing assessment include?
A mid-year marketing review will be very similar to a year-end review, only shorter. It allows you to review what you have accomplished and areas for improvement. Below are some of the areas you will measure as part of the review.
- Key Performance Indicators : You should have outlined your KPIs at the beginning of the year. These are the metrics you refer back to to evaluate your marketing activities and progress toward your goals. Examples of KPIs might be leads generated, lead-to-conversion ratio, sales generated, etc. But quality KPIs set specific goals. So you might have a goal of generating 50 leads per month with a lead-to-conversion ratio of 10 percent.
- Conversion rates : You’ll compare these to previous years to see if there’s been any change. An increase is certainly good, but you may also notice that your conversion rates have dropped. This could indicate a need for fresh content, improved website usability, or better graphics that resonate better with your audience.
- ROI: There are many ways to measure ROI. afghanistan business directory You can look at cost per conversion or track ROI based on customer lifetime value (LTV). LTV is more difficult to calculate and requires you to track all revenue from that customer since they purchased from you.
While these are the most important metrics because they indicate the success of your business, you will also want to track a few other metrics that may tell you that something is wrong with your marketing or that there has been a subtle shift that may be holding back your marketing. These more granular metrics will help you respond to marketing changes, such as updating search engine algorithms or removing third-party links that point to your website.
- Interaction with social networks
- Total site traffic and traffic by source
- Traffic to the site from organic search
- Search Engine Rankings Over Time
- Leads generated by channel
- Cost per click and cost per conversion
- Website pages with the highest bounce rates
- Site pages with the lowest conversion rates
These more granular metrics are the items 5 ways to implement seo in your inbound marketing strategy you should be reporting on month to month. But if you’re not already tracking and reporting them, mid-year is a great time to start.
Every small change in these metrics doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. By tracking them, you’ll see clear indications of when you need to make adjustments or when there’s a clear downward trend in your progress.