At the end of every year, we start making plans for what’s to come. Year-end planning, evaluation of budgets, adjustments to line items and a schedule for the year comes up in conversation as we get deep into the fourth quarter.
This week’s Big Marketing Minute focuses on why plans around your marketing need to happen more often than that. We are well past the halfway point of the year. Have you taken a look at your marketing to see if it’s still doing what you set out to do?
This is a process of stepping back. Get out of the middle of the circle you’re in and step all the way back – as if you were holding hands with the people next to you and you step so far out in the circle you can hardly reach other.
Now, take a look at your business. Are you still on the same course you started this year? Have your overall business objectives changed since the year started? It’s not uncommon, especially for growing companies, that they do alter, even slightly.
Once you have a clear head about what the current objectives are, take a step into the circle. Come a little closer. Take a look at your current marketing strategy. Does it line up? Is the work you are doing to implement marketing tactics benefiting the business objectives?
If not, it’s time for a change.
We recently had an all-team meeting with our client, as well as their PR team. We could see some of the tactics we were using were not benefiting some things that had changed in the business since the beginning of the year so we sat down and re-identified our overall business objectives and purpose. What is important today and going forward that maybe was not on our radar as a top need last October?
- Our SEO reports have shown a difference in keywords – that matters. How are people finding us and are we moving up the rankings there?
- We have a different type of event schedule than we did a year ago.
- We’ve honed our overall brand message and need to be sure our marketing messages are in line.
One step we also took time to do was to look at our services listed on the website – are we addressing those in content? Do we need to consolidate or shift things around? Is a new website design on the horizon?
Our best tip?
We did this meeting offsite. The client and internal team couldn’t be interrupted with actual work. Our team could ask the questions we need and keep reining us all in to stay on topic (newsflash: that was my job). We had a flipchart and a hard ending time. It was a very productive meeting.
We are now in the midst of the follow-up work and as we get toward the end of the year and start planning for next year, this is going to be an important step in our thinking, as a team.
If you haven’t gone through this process yet this year, I highly encourage it. Let me know if you do and how it goes!
by 
