If we’re ever drawn on the one thing you can do to elevate your marketing and maximise ROI, our answer isn’t a silver bullet or particularly sexy. In fact, we’re often met with a ‘really?’ when we say that reviewing your marketing activity should always be your go-to.
Be honest, when was the last time you properly reviewed what you were doing, how effective it is and where it could be improved?
Last year? Last month? Quarterly? Annually?
When you’re focused on growing your business, you might have the best intentions when it comes to auditing your activity, but we can see why it might end up at the bottom of the list.
So what should you be reviewing?
The breadth of data and anecdotal evidence available for your marketing activity is vast and in-depth, and every organisation’s priorities will be different. However, we’ve found over the last fifteen years that a neat set of the five T&Cs will give you a strong foundation when you’re auditing what’s been done.
When it comes to a solid review, our go-to pillars are always:
• Tracking
• Teams
• Tech
• Channels
• Content
Tracking: What are you measuring?
Before you drill down into all that lovely data and find out what’s been working, you need to make sure you’re actually tracking it. Tracking the right metrics, in the right places, and using the right tools is fundamental to any marketing review.
Whether you’re assessing weekly activity for an individual campaign or doing a full annual audit of all aspects of marketing, tracking can make the process a doddle (or, if you don’t get it right, plunge you into data hell).
When it comes to your tracking set up, you should be asking three big questions:
• Which KPIs are important to us?
• How do we track these KPIs?
• Who is responsible for maintaining effective tracking?
The first question should tie neatly into your overall business strategy and is most likely to include some variation on sales, conversions or leads. It’s undoubtedly vital that you understand which marketing activities are driving these, but we’d also encourage you to consider other, softer KPIs which indicate success at different stages of the marketing and sales funnel. For example, where are users engaging with your brand, who is referring traffic (and business) to you, and where is there audience growth.
Once you have these KPIs, then consider how you’re tracking them.
Do you have the right software in place?
Are you surveying the market?
The world really is your oyster when it comes to how to track, so take the time to consider your approach and which tools help you do the job.
When campaigns are live, and everything is progressing at pace, tracking can become everyone’s job but no-one’s responsibility. Make sure it’s someone’s assigned responsibility to track those KPIs, that they’re given ample time to do so and a platform to share their findings. Lastly, make sure they’re equipped with the skill set and tools to do so effectively.
Technology: How is technology supporting your ambitions?
That brings us neatly on to technology. One big part of how tech can support you is by facilitating user tracking, making it much easier to understand what your users are doing and how your audience behaves.
Tech can show you what marketing activity is working, what isn’t working, and then allow you to do something about it. So reviewing your tech set-up is key to reviewing your tracking set-up.
When you’re reviewing your tech, it’s essential to understand what you’ve got. Step one is to create a list of all the tech you’ve got. By tech, we mean software, programmes and hardware, and across your organisation, you’ve probably got some overlap in usage or functionality and maybe even multiple instances of the same software in different departments that are using it for slightly different things.
Once you’ve got your comprehensive list, the second part is to audit that list. For your tech audit, you should be compiling:
• Users: who uses and what for?
• Efficiency: is it being used in the best way?
• Maximisation: are you utilising all the features
Your teams are vital to getting this right, as they have insider knowledge on day-to-day usage and will be able to appraise whether something is snake oil or if it really delivers on its promise.
With clear answers to those questions, you can then decide which tech has to stay, which needs to go, and finally, which you need to improve your ways of working with. Improving how you use your tech could include stakeholders making a commitment to using it regularly, or it might be introducing more effective cross-functional working, adjusting your subscription to better reflect the needs of the business, or supporting users with some training and upskilling.
Teams: Who is delivering activity?
Reviewing your team is just as important as reviewing the activity, the tech and the other tools. After all, an effective, fully upskilled and properly resourced team is what will take your marketing from great to brilliant.
That said, it can be the trickiest of the five T&Cs , simply because it’s human and there are human relationships and variables involved.
Reviewing your team isn’t about outputs only or placing any blame. It’s about understanding how your team are set up to drive the delivery of your objectives. When reviewing this specifically, the key areas to consider are:
• Existing skill set
• Existing appetite and attitude
• Transferable skills
• Areas to upskill
Take a really holistic look at your team and their skill set. Talk to your teams about what would they like to improve on, where would they like to upskill and if there any different skills developed elsewhere that they could be applying now.
Interrogating all of this through the lens of where you want to take your marketing means you’re able to bring together the ambition and the actual to devise a route forward. A particularly useful tool for this is our skills and ambitions tracker which Build members can access as part of the resource pack.
Whilst your internal team is the core of your marketing activity, it’s important to remember that your campaign team isn’t just your direct reports. If you need a skill or approach that isn’t within your full-time permanent team, all’s not lost. Take a look at other teams in the organisation.
For instance, do you have a research department that could actively support a data project? Have you got a really great tech department that you can tap into for the selection of software?
There are also external teams, so don’t discount freelancers or agencies. Look at the niche or sporadic resource you might need and bring that into your review and planning to achieve your business goals.
Content: What are you saying?
When it comes to reviewing your content, there are two areas for consideration; how it reflects your brand and how it supports your marketing objectives.
The first part is about whether it fits with your brand values and your ‘so what?’, presenting your brand as you’d want it to be viewed. Brand collateral has a nasty habit of taking on a life of its own at times, so whilst there will be content that absolutely reflects your brand, it’s likely there are errant sales presentations, rogue social accounts or some less than perfect posters.
Channel your inner detective and dig up as much collateral and content as you possibly can, gather it physically and virtually together and assess it based on the following criteria:
• If you removed the logo, would it be obvious it was all from the same brand/people?
• Is it authentic to us, our brand and our people?
• Is it useful, helpful or interesting?
• Is it unique?
Group collateral into does the job, doesn’t do the job and somewhat does the job, then create a roadmap for fixing the weaknesses, prioritising content seen by the most people from your most important audience groups.
The other side to reviewing your content is reviewing it for its effectiveness. In short, is it doing what it should? The two big questions here are:
• Does it resonate?
• How do we know?
Knowing whether your messages are resonating with your target audiences is key to successful marketing. Gauging whether they’re being understood and received, and if you’re desired outcomes are being met, allows you to plan effectively and maximise available resource going forward.
But how do you know? There are several indicators that your content resonates, with different parameters more appropriate for the various channels. Some of these include:
• Brand sentiment research
• Social media engagement
• CTR on emails, landing pages and ads
Think about the KPIs you set in the tracking stage and compare messaging against that on a channel by channel basis to understand the trends across multiple channels and spot synergies between the messaging that really delivers.
Channels: Where are you saying it?
With a huge wealth of channels and platforms available to connect with our customers, it can sometimes feel like a bit of a minefield when deciding where to allocate resource.
You may have asked yourself:
How do I know which channels are working?
How do I know which channels aren’t working?
How do I know if we’re using the right channels for our brand?
When it comes to channel reviews, we’ll be the first to admit, there’s a lot of work to be done. How do you review channels, and where do you start?
The best place to start is with what you’ve done before. After all, if you know where you’ve been, you can better plan for where you’re going. Look at the existing channels where you’re currently sharing your marketing messaging.
Use website data, native insights for your social media platforms, CRM lead data, AVE, lead capture and anything else you can get your hands on, with ideally at least one data set per channel.
Then you need to dust off the different KPIs for activity from the tracking stage and take an honest look at if and how each channel is meeting them. If a channel isn’t, one of three things is going on:
1. The KPIs aren’t channel appropriate
2. You’re not using the channel effectively
3. The channel isn’t right for your brand
If you’re confident it isn’t one and your content review has ruled out two, it might be time to consider number three and make some decisions about current channel suitability.
Once you’ve assessed your existing channels, you need to consider the channels that you could utilise but aren’t. This is where it gets a little trickier, as the collective channels make a big old pie and your existing channels are just a measly little slice of that.
When you’re scanning the market to review untapped channels, use any and all of the data available and take specialist advice where necessary. Core questions to consider in your review are:
How does my target audience respond to this channel?
Are my competitors utilising the channel?
Have we got resource and budget to introduce the channel?
Can we model the ROI for this channel, and what does it look like?
A cautionary word on new channels, particularly emerging channels; just because ‘everybody else’ is doing it or it’s being heralded as the next silver bullet doesn’t mean your brand should adopt the channel without a clear strategy.
The thing about reviewing your activity is, it doesn’t have to be labour intensive or (dare we say it) boring. If you apply a clear structure and set of parameters to your approach, it can become almost effortless and make a real difference to your business.
We’ll let you in on a little secret too, the more you do it, the better it gets.
If you’re serious about growth from marketing and are willing to devote some time to developing the skills and strategies to do so, Build could be for you.
