The end of year marketing review
5 ways that leaders of growing technology businesses can ensure marketing is in shape for a new year
End of year is a good time for reviewing and reflecting on what has gone right, gone wrong, or just slightly missed the mark. While companies often conduct a business review at this time of year, it can often fail to address an essential strategic driver of your success: marketing.
Marketing is unquestionably among the most critical functions for growth in any business. It ensures that your customers and prospects know who you are, what you believe in and why they should even bother to consider doing business with you. It provides them with the information, channels and opportunities your audiences need to form relationships, to buy, and to share their experiences.
The learnings from a thorough review of marketing are vital decision drivers for leaders of business at all scales – but especially for those who are in growth mode.
It is therefore something that should be owned and driven by you.
An end of year marketing report is not a review
A good end of year business review aims to take an eagle-eye view. It looks more holistically than is possible during the day-to-day busy-ness of business at the enterprise as a whole. It helps to remind yourself of your ambitions and see how well you’re doing against them, evaluate needs and recognise failures, as well as successes.
This often isn’t done when it comes to marketing.
You may gather end of year reports from all your team, so you can capture and understand the state of play. However, an end of year marketing report will all too often focus on the activity completed, followers gained, subscribers signed up or coverage achieved. It rarely tells you much of real use to the business other than where the budget has gone.
If you plan 2020 to be the year where you expand into new market spaces, attract new audiences, claim new territory and above all keep sales growth going, then it’s critical to cut out the marketing activity that doesn’t work and do more of what does.
You need to keep innovating how you communicate and market your business, if you are to stand out from the competition. Above all, you need to ensure a super-strong strategic connection between marketing and sales and the relationships it must generate.
You need to lead an end of year marketing review.
How to do a strategic marketing end of year review – 5 considerations and key questions
Get sales and marketing in step behind business strategy – this is a great time to get the team together. If you’ve teams or individuals working separately on marketing and sales, this is a great time to get them all together. As a leader of a growing business, you might still have both of these under your direction, if not execution. Either way, it’s a good time to ask: Is marketing fully integrated into our business growth strategy and helping us achieve our strategic growth objectives? Are sales and marketing collaborating for success? Is enough marketing activity focused on driving and enabling sales, versus other aims such as building our industry presence? What measurable value is marketing bringing to the business?
Revisit your definition of marketing success – all your marketing should be focused on appropriate and SMART objectives. But the M for measurement is a common challenge. The end of year marketing review is a great time to reflect how success in marketing translates to success for the business. Take the chance to review and reset the Key Performance Indicators that should be central to the mission of all your marketing operatives or agencies. Consider whether this year’s KPIs were a hit or a miss – but also ask why. Ask yourself whether achievement or progress against these actually marked progress for the business itself, and be certain you are setting clear direction for marketing to support next year.
Synch up your marketing agencies – as companies scale, they acquire a cadre of marketing suppliers either on a freelance basis or by taking on agencies of different types. It brings in valuable knowledge and skills, adds resources and hopefully adds creative energy and new ideas that can help you fuel your growth. Over a year, this can wane. Relationships don’t always run smoothly – the odd misunderstanding, disappointment, or feeling a lack of value is common. Sometimes, suppliers simply aren’t given a clear enough brief. Sometimes, there’s a personality clash. They are often working in silos – that’s not a recipe for synchronised success. Whatever the cause: it’s a great time of year to review your relationship from both sides. Again – not a ‘report’ – you don’t want or need a recap of what you’ve bought. You do need to analyse: is this working? If not, why not? If agencies are underinformed or not delivering a ROI, what can be done? How can you help them to succeed? How can you become a real ‘one team’ that’s pulling in the same direction?
Listen for the ‘jarring notes’ in your messages — over the year, your messages will have drifted. It happens by default as collateral materials are written, new campaign ideas are generated, website updates are done, interviews held, and blogs and press releases are written. Even if you had a very clear message-board back in January 2019 – you’ve probably diverged from it, and the proof-points you use may have changed. It’s the perfect time of year to look across everywhere you are communicating and spot the differences. Now is also the time of year to think: what must we set out to say in 2020? How will we structure our messages and then communicate them in the right way, to the right audiences?
Look for the ‘blur’ in your branding – just as with the words you use, your branding is used and abused constantly as you run your normal operations. Over time, the brand look and feel becomes compromised very easily and a different image emerges on social media versus the website versus print or downloadable materials. It’s time to check: is everyone using the brand guidelines and are they fit for purpose for what we need to do next year? Have we considered image guidelines, social branding and audio branding on our podcasts? How do we want the branding to evolve and serve us in 2020?
The above questions will give you a strong starting point for structuring the marketing review that is right for your business.
With a critical eye, you can help ensure that your marketing activity and supporters will deliver real business value in the coming year.
Can we help? If you feel that an independent eye might help guide this process, we would be delighted to help. Just call us on 020 3865 6420, or fill in the contact form.