Setting the Stage for Success in the New Year: How to Conduct an End-of-Year Marketing Review
As the end of the year quickly approaches, it's the perfect time for businesses to reflect on their marketing strategies, assess their performance, and set the stage for a successful year ahead. Conducting an end-of-year marketing review is an essential process that can help you assess what worked, what didn't, and what can be improved upon. By assessing the past year's strategies and outcomes, you can set the stage for a more effective and efficient marketing plan for the coming year.
6 Reasons Why Every Business Should Conduct an End-of-Year Marketing Review
Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: A comprehensive review helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing campaigns. Knowing what worked well can inform your strategy moving forward, while recognising areas that need improvement is essential for making the necessary adjustments.
Stay Competitive: The marketing landscape is continually evolving, and staying competitive is crucial for business success. By analysing your marketing efforts and those of your competitors, you can identify trends and opportunities that can be leveraged in the new year.
Performance Evaluation: It allows you to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, campaigns, and channels. You can determine which marketing efforts contributed to your business's growth and which ones fell short.
Data-Driven Decision Making: By reviewing your marketing data, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget and efforts in the coming year. This minimises the risk of wasting resources on ineffective tactics.
Identifying Opportunities and Course Correction: A thorough review can reveal potentially untapped opportunities, new trends, or emerging platforms that your business should consider incorporating into its marketing strategy. Alongside this, it can also highlight if certain strategies or tactics aren't working as expected, the end-of-year review provides a chance to pivot and make necessary adjustments.
Align with Business Goals: Having the chance to reflect on your current marketing strategies can help ensure that you are in sync with your company's mission, vision, and objectives. Your marketing efforts should align with your broader business goals. This alignment is key to driving overall success.
The End-of-Year Marketing Review Checklist
Now that we've established why an end-of-year marketing review is crucial, let's dive into the checklist of things to consider during the process:
Review Goals and Objectives:
Review your marketing goals from the previous year and assess whether you achieved them.
Set clear, measurable objectives for the upcoming year.
Audience and Engagement Analysis:
Determine if there are any changes in your target audience's demographics, behaviours, and preferences.
Ensure your buyer personas are up-to-date and relevant.
Are you responding to all your comments?
Do you spend at least 5 to 10 mins a day engaging with your followers?
Have you responded to all your DM’s?
Content Review:
Identify your top-performing such as blog posts, articles, or videos based on views, shares, and engagement.
Which content topics and formats resonated most with your audience?
Are you sharing user generated content?
Are there any gaps in your content strategy, such as missing topics or infrequent updates?
Branding:
Is your branding clear and consistent across all your content?
Do you have a clear recognisable logo?
Do you have 3 - 4 brand colours and are you using them correctly?
Are you using the same 2 to 3 fonts and are they easy to read?
Social Media Analysis:
Are your handles/bio’s consistent cross platform?
Do your posts look professional?
Are your photos clear? Top Tip: Always clean your camera before you take photos, even if you think it’s clean… it probably isn’t!
Did you put hashtags in the caption?
Do your captions feature key words?
Determine which platforms yielded the best results and consider adjustments.
Check out Sprout Social’s - 50+ of the most important social media marketing statistics for 2023: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/
Website Performance:
Is your website content up to date?
Do you have any broken links? Are all your links working?
Review website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates.
Identify any pages that need improvements.
Earlier this year, we sat down to chat with Stephen of creedigital, an expert in website building and design, to find out his insight on Website Dos and Don’ts, you can read all about it here: https://www.bevic.co.uk/blog/website-do-dont
SEO Review:
What is your SEO score?
Assess your website's search engine ranking, keyword performance, and organic traffic.
What could you do to help improve your rankings and visibility?
Are you using Meta Descriptions, Tags and Alt Text correctly?
Partnerships:
Are there any local businesses you could partner with?
Are there any local influencers you could invite?
Have you engaged in local community groups?
Email Marketing:
Identify what your top-performing campaign was?
Analyse email campaign performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Clean and update your email list to maintain deliverability.
Is your branding up to date?
By following the checklist outlined in this blog post, you'll be well-prepared to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of marketing and position your business for success in the coming year.
Conducting an end-of-year marketing review is a crucial step in setting your business up for success in the new year. This is not only a great reflective exercise but also a strategic one and should not be overlooked. By evaluating your performance and identifying strengths and weaknesses, it can empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, refine strategies, and set realistic goals for the new year.
Not sure how to write a marketing plan? Don’t worry we got you covered - https://www.bevic.co.uk/blog/2022/3/30/how-to-write-a-marketing-plan
“Remember, the key to effective marketing is continuous improvement, and an end-of-year review is your roadmap to achieving it.”
If you’re looking for help with your marketing, get in touch with the team here at Bevic who specialise in outsourced marketing and PR support.
We are available for power-hours, more detailed workshops, campaign work or ongoing support.