Is It Time to Review Your Marketing Strategy? Yes!
“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” —Oprah Winfrey
As the new year gets underway, many folks start thinking about new budgets, new goals, and plans for the upcoming year.
But there’s something else you’ll need to put on your calendar too: Your marketing strategy roadmap review! No matter how well done your marketing roadmap may be, no plan is perfect. And competitors and marketplaces can—and do—change on a regular basis!
Review at least once a year…or more
A marketing plan needs to be reviewed in its entirety, at the very least once a year. If you can do it more often — let’s say once a quarter — you may save valuable time and money by not letting an unsuccessful execution continue on.
Most importantly, make sure to schedule a time to thoroughly review your marketing roadmap. Invite team members or key stakeholders who can offer a broader view of your plan.
Where to begin?
You may want to begin your review with the same steps you used to create your marketing roadmap.
As we covered in an earlier post, there are three steps to building a marketing roadmap. So evaluating your current state would include the results of your previous marketing roadmap.
If one of your original goals was to post on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn twice a week, but you weren’t able to achieve that, then it’s time to look at your priorities and see if they’re the same. Or, look at the ROI of your campaigns to see if you are getting the results you need.
Then, getting your team engaged is vital, especially with the information you’ve gleaned from the previous year’s plan.
Inc offers some suggestions for what to consider when you do sit down with your team, such as:
- What results are you trying to get, and more importantly, do they matter for the business?
- Are you using real data or are you relying on guesswork? If you can’t measure it, you won’t truly be able to know if you are successful.
- Have you been sharing your insights with your team? First, your staff may be able to use these insights and data to do better work at their job. And, second, you may get some ideas that you hadn’t thought of previously when your team offers their insights.
Other times to review your marketing roadmap
Outside of your regularly scheduled plan review, there are some other times that make perfect sense for you to stop and take stock of your marketing roadmap.
Here’s some other markers to keep in mind:
- After product or service shifts. If your offerings change in your small business, there likely will be a need for you to review how that new service will be promoted. Along with that, you may have a new target audience, or at least an additional audience that you hadn’t taken into consideration when you did your original marketing roadmap.
- During campaign-end. If you have a marketing campaign that’s scheduled to last three months, it’s usually a good idea to take a look at the results at the close of that 3-month period. Ask yourself: Are they in keeping with your overall goals? If not, it may be time to take a look at your entire roadmap and make some adjustments.
- After a restructuring. If your small business has undergone any kind of restructuring, you really should review the entire marketing strategy. There may be new marketing budgets to consider, especially if the restructure is due to financial issues. There may also be new team members working on marketing, or the company’s overall goals may have changed.
Get a snapshot of your marketing strategy today
It’s not always easy to get started on that marketing strategy review when your current marketing plan is too detailed and too hard to get your arms around.
Your goal should be a plan that’s simple and achievable. How do you know if you are there? We’ve got some great information at Discover Redmap, where you can take a free, short quiz to get immediate results on how well you are doing with your marketing. And if you’d like to know more, schedule a free call with us. We’d love to talk!
Tomato Fish Is An Indianapolis Consulting Company Focused On Helping Small And Midsize Businesses Make Good Strategic Planning Decisions.
