When’s the last time you thought about your marketing plan? Did you create a strategy and then set it and forget it? It may not be the best plan for your business any longer.
Here’s a quick four-part audit that you can perform to see if your marketing plan strategy should stay or go.
1. What is your primary marketing objective?
Every marketing plan needs to have clearly defined objectives. It helps to keep all of your efforts organized and focused. That way you can check to see if a strategy is working or not.
Successful marketing is always effective, so before you begin your audit, keep your primary marketing objective top of mind. If nothing else is accomplished with your marketing, this is the objective that matters the most. All other objectives are secondary and should support the primary.
Ask Yourself: Is this helping us with our objective? What is the result we want our marketing efforts to produce?
Common marketing objectives are:
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Promote New Products or Services
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Grow Brand Awareness
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Target New Customers
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Retain Existing Customers
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Develop Brand Loyalty
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Build Industry Authority
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Increase Sales and/or Revenue
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Increase Email Mailing List Size
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Increase Client Bookings
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Increase Social Media Followers
2. Create an inventory of marketing assets
If you aren’t currently keeping an inventory of all of your marketing assets, now is the time to create a system so you can manage it.
An asset is ANY form of content that has been created and shared to increase your brand awareness. You have more than you probably realize.
It includes email newsletters, white papers, subscriber opt-ins, website blog posts, social media posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, flyers, brochures, and more.
You want to be able to say, we created 12 podcast episodes, 12 YouTube videos, 4 email newsletters, 6 website blog posts, etc.
Don’t get overwhelmed. Just look at your assets from the last 6 months. It will provide enough data so you can draw accurate conclusions.
3. Look At The Data
Data really is king! Without it, you are just flying in the wind without knowing if you are headed towards the right destination. It may feel tedious, but wouldn’t you like to know that on May 1st, you had 100 Instagram followers, and on August 1st, you are up to 200? If you don’t create a starting point, you don’t have anything to measure against.
To measure your social media performance, you can look at the number of likes, shares, engagement, and click-through rate.
To measure your website performance, you can examine bounce rate, average time on page, click-through rate, and inbound links.
To measure email marketing, you can track open rates, list size, unsubscribe rates, and outbound click-through.
One channel might be outperforming another channel. If your time is limited, maybe you scale back on the frequency of posts on the channels that don’t have a high return-on-investment and up the frequency on the channels that do.
4. Draw Your Conclusions
The final step in your marketing plan audit is to draw some conclusions.
The results of marketing don’t happen overnight. It takes time to build brand awareness and make sure that your messaging is speaking to your ideal customers. That’s why you need to understand what people are responding to or if the message is being received.
If no one is opening your email newsletters, it may mean that you need to experiment with new subject lines. Or maybe you need to clear your list and get new subscribers who are actually interested.
If your primary marketing objective is to receive more inquiry calls, you might discover that you aren’t getting a lot of website page views. So you can put more effort into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so prospective clients can find you.
Once you have some conclusions, you can make some updates and stay on track.
If you don’t currently have a marketing plan and would like one, reach out to us. We would love to help you create a plan that works specifically for your business. We amplify your message so you can reach your objectives and your business goals!
