You’ve approached this year with a plan, made implementations, written plenty of useful content and run campaigns to make sure you reach your prospective customers. But do you know how effective everything has been and what to change in the coming months?
You can do it with a well-planned, thorough audit of your marketing actions, and the time after the summer is perfect for that.
Analyzing your efforts mid-year can help you understand your current standing and improve your performance for the rest of the year.
Today, we’ll discuss the what and why of performing a comprehensive digital marketing audit.
If you prefer a more hands-on introduction to the subject, join our upcoming webinar. You’ll get even more practical tips on a successful mid-year marketing review and have your questions answered during a Q&A session.
Mid-year marketing review: Analyze your performance and prepare for a successful Q4
What is a mid-year marketing review?
A well-structured marketing audit can help you assess all of your efforts undertaken from the start of the year until now. It lets you evaluate what you accomplished and where you missed out, and look for room for improvement.
Your key performance indicators (KPI) should become a central point of your review. KPIs are metrics that show the success of individual marketing activities you’re using to execute your ultimate goals. They are the most important values for understanding marketing’s influence on business success.
KPIs will differ depending on your industry and what earns money for your business – examples include conversion rates, ROI or lifetime value of a customer (LTV). KPIs should be influenced by your overall marketing objectives and previous benchmarks.
Hopefully, you’ll have benchmarked your KPIs at the beginning of Q1. This would allow you to track the improvement and set some objective numbers that reflect appropriate progress towards the goals for each quarter.
Why your organization needs a mid-year marketing review
A marketing strategy is not set in stone. It should evolve when necessary.
Accurately plotting out an entire year in one go is challenging. You can base your initiatives on past data and your understanding of user behavior as presented in your marketing tools, such as analytics and automation platforms.
Looking at past data doesn’t provide you with all the answers, such as why users leave certain pages quickly or don’t click through to other articles on your blog. You often need to try out new approaches and assess their results to understand what impact they had on your marketing.
The summer months are a slow season for many organizations. Different team members could be on holiday at various times, making it difficult to keep all marketing channels equally active and stay on top of all the projects.
But, as everyone returns to work, you can reassess your marketing strategy for the year, see what could be improved and where to put more of your focus.
There are still a few months left before the end of the year – it’s enough time to draw conclusions from your marketing efforts to date and plan how to adjust them to better meet your yearly goals. You can make the necessary updates to refresh your efforts for the second half of the year.
What aspects should be part of your marketing review process
With your KPIs in mind, you need to look back on your activities so far, think about how to adjust them in the future, and revise your strategy.
You can divide the review into two parts.
Look back on the past
Before you outline where you’re headed, look at where you’ve been.
Website goals and conversions
You should particularly focus on data concerning the following aspects:
- How users navigate your website and what actions they perform during their visits
- How people arrive at conversion pages and other important pages, like product or contact pages
- Which channels perform best and convert the most traffic
- Which campaigns perform best and convert the most traffic
- Which channels work best at particular stages of the marketing funnel
- Which sources tend to refer traffic to your website
Content and campaign performance
Look into the created content and campaigns to see which topics and formats work best and what content should be better optimized.
Consider the following cases:
- Which types of content your audience loves and interacts with the most
- If your best performing blog posts are up-to-date and contain all the relevant information
- If your content is well-optimized for SEO: includes all the right keywords, and is it structured in a way that makes it easy to scan
- Which paid campaigns generate the most valuable traffic and are worth investing more in, and which of them don’t bring the expected results
Sales and marketing alignment
Analyze your sales performance and consult the process with your sales team to check if you’re on the same page. Make sure that:
- Marketing and sales teams have a common, research-based understating of your ideal client profile
- All the leads created by marketing are qualified and processed by the sales team
Plan the future
Once you have a good idea of Q1, Q2 and Q3 performance, outline your expectations for Q4.
Assess your marketing performance to date and adjust the course for the remainder of the year. Consider any expected changes in business, such as seasonality, or any factors that may affect sales performance, such as launching a new product.
In your plan for the end of the year, combine your year-to-date analysis and expectations for the year. Shift marketing dollars to enhance the efforts that are producing the desired results or exceeded your expectations. At the same time, invest less money into strategies that underperform.
What’s next
All the above steps are things to prepare before conducting the review and taking the necessary action. Now it’s time to get ready to learn all the details from our upcoming webinar.
Watch how the Piwik PRO marketing team conduct their own mid-year review to make sure they have all their ducks in the row before the busy last quarter of the year.
