By Aileen Barron, Green Acre Marketing
Measuring and reviewing your marketing activity and how hard it is working for you should be a never-ending item on the to-do-list.
Obviously, the frequency of this can be weekly, daily or monthly; depending on the level of marketing activity, and how it ties in with a particular campaign. Some marketing touchpoints require constant monitoring in order to keep on top of tweaks that will further elevate the success of that activity, while others are often based around longer term brand awareness.
However, if you are not yet convinced of how important constantly reviewing your marketing activity is, here is a list of reasons to push it up the priority list:
- It helps you determine which marketing activities are working in real time;
- You get data on those activities that are not working before they cost you more time and money;
- You can take measures to concentrate more on what is working.
Standard recommendations are that a marketing review should take place every quarter, but I would only view this as acceptable to determine an overall picture of how well the campaign performed in hindsight.
If you can commit to reviewing your activity more often, then you can take action and make adjustments. This is especially true in the current unprecedented period of time that we have experienced since March, where consumers have changed rapidly from where they used to engage with your products and your brand.
You may have noticed that the channels to reach your target audience have changed. The faster you noticed that change the better. As an example, there was a dramatic increase lately, in the volume of traffic on social media and it may have been a good time to give more attention to those platforms.
Being paranoid about your marketing activity is a good trait to have in your team, as they will want to constantly be reassured that what they are doing is working and be more driven by the metrics.
Once you discover activities that you are spending time and resources on, that aren’t aligned with your vision or aren’t getting you closer to your outcome goals, then it is time to reconsider them.
Reconsidering does not mean shelving these activities – it just means you need to do further investigation as to why they are not working.
Findings likely to come from your marketing review
Some of the findings from your marketing review can offer you such useful information.
Here are some of the most common ones we see and are worth noting:
- Your website does not actually fulfil the reason why you got someone to click there in the first place and fails to deliver the content they were expecting to find there. By tracking the user experience on your website, it may become glaringly obvious that people bounce straight off it;
- Your social media posts are simply not engaging and potentially lack organically captured relatable content;
- Your written content or technical updates fail to offer anything new or simply don’t resonate with your customer;
- Your message and visuals lack consistency;
- It’s been done before and run its course.
If you are serious about tracking and monitoring your marketing activity, it comes back to the few basic tools that I report on regularly – google analytics, social media insights, leads captured, SEO analytics.
There are lots of paid tools that will dig deeper and provide some detailed insights; however, if the basics are done well you will naturally graduate towards those.
For assistance with measuring your most recent activity or helping you dissect your findings, contact: [email protected].