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About every 30 days, we get a new page in the calendar. A fresh start. Many people use these to start something new – a new diet, a new exercise program… but it's also a great time just for a reset.
Especially in your marketing.
What is a Marketing Reset?
A marketing reset is just a quick time to review and reset what you've been doing in your marketing – what's working and what's not – to make sure that your marketing stays on track.
It shouldn't take much time – this isn't when you're updating your entire strategy, but just making sure that everything is performing the way you expect.
When should I do a Marketing Reset?
Marketing resets should be done on a monthly and quarterly basis, while you do strategic planning annually.
You can also throw in a reset any time you're making a change in your business or think you need a touchpoint on performance.
What do I do in a Monthly Marketing Reset?
Step 1: Review Your Analytics
Look at all your data from the last month, including your Google Analytics website traffic, your email open and click-through rates, your social media engagement, and your conversion rates.
Be sure to also look at your ad spends and ROI!
While you’re reviewing your analytics, answer these questions:
- What went well?
- What didn’t?
- What surprised you?
Review Your Goals
Each month you should review and reset your goals for the month.
Remember, goals are different from plans. PLANS are how you get to your GOALS. (You'll review your plans soon).
- What are your financial goals?
- What are your visibility goals? Visibility goal includes things like page views, new followers, new subscribers, and new backlinks.
- What are your accomplishment goals? Accomplishment goals could include creating new products, improving a process, or implementing a new system.
Be sure to compare your current month goals to the previous month's goals to make sure you're on track. If your goal in May was to make $10,000 and you made $500, then making $10,000 in June may be hard to accomplish without a significant change in plans.
Check Plans and Schedules
Now is the time to break out all your to-do lists and marketing calendars. Don't just look at this month either – it's a good time to do a quick preview of what you need to do to be set up well for the next month. (So, if you're doing this in early August, you'll want to review August and September schedules and to-do lists and calendars.)
- What do you need to do to accomplish this schedule? Do you need to reach out to your VA for graphics or scheduling? Do you need to schedule meetings (or cancel meetings to allow for more individual work time)?
- What needs to change? If you've planned out several months or a year, things almost certainly have changed. Maybe you've added a new product to your programs or canceled something you were planning on doing. The world tone could be completely different from when you were planning (like how back to school is different in 2020 than it was in 2019)!
- What can you cut? When you compare your plans and schedules with your analytics, you may quickly find things that you can cut to get yourself more time to do more meaningful work.
- What needs to be added? When your goals change – whether they're increasing, decreasing, or just moving around, you sometimes need to add something new to the mix. Changes are also essential to consider if you've added or removed a team member, changed a process, or shifted a strategy.
- What’s a “should” instead of a “must”? There’s nothing wrong with doing your “should” plans, as long as they’re not distracting you from the “must” plans, or creating mental clutter. Sometimes “should” are there because they relate to other people’s priorities or something that you heard a guru say you “have to” do. J
Your Quarterly Marketing Reset
If you're doing a monthly marketing reset, your quarterly marketing reset will go much faster. But it does require a bit of a deeper dive than your monthly reset. Here's what you'll add:
Review Your Analytics
Website Analytics Review
When you're reviewing your analytics, don't stop by looking at page views, visitors, bounce rate, and overall referrals. Spend some time digging into how people are finding you and what they’re doing once they do. Look at which channels are driving the highest conversions or ROI. The most important metrics to evaluate will be different depending on what kind of business you have. An eCommerce business will focus on purchase conversion rates and average order size. In contrast, a publishing business needs to consider page views and page views per session to ensure they're getting enough traffic for their ad sales goals.
Email Marketing Analytics Review
At least quarterly is also a time to review the performance of your automations & funnels. While it's common to see diminishing returns in terms of open rates & conversion rates, you can always test new ways to improve the more emails you send.
Social Media Analytics Review
Do a deeper dive into engagement here – not just which specific posts are doing well but also what's different or unique about those posts. In most social media strategies, you should be using a blend of educational, entertaining (or inspiring), and promotional posts. If your promotional posts are always falling flat, or your engaging posts only get a few likes, it may be time to revise your strategy.
You can also look at:
- Hashtag strategies
- Posting frequency
- Follower acquisition trends
Ad Spends
When you're looking at your ad spends, don't just take a look at your overall performance. Dive deeper into each campaign and each ad. Ad performance doesn't just end at the individual creative performance – you should also connect it to the full funnel to fully understand where you can improve performance.
Consider:
- Customer Acquisition Cost – How much have you budgeted to acquire a new customer through this channel? Are you spending more or less?
- Cost per click – how much are you spending per click?
- Where does the funnel break down? Again, some funnel fall out is expected, but when you're investing in generating traffic, you need to identify where you can plug leaks to increase your overall conversion rate.
Goal Review
Most business, productivity, and personal-development gurus talk about having short, mid, and long-term goals. Short and mid-term goals are the ones that you're likely to review quarterly. (Long term goals typically are multi-year goals.)
While you'll want to look at how you're performing on all three aspects – financially, visibility, and accomplishments – you also need to look at trends across the quarter and the last quarter.
Financial Tracking:
Pull out your tracking spreadsheets and chart out your projected growth and your actual growth. Where do your next three months of financial goals align? Do they continue on your current trajectory or spike too far up or down?
Visibility Tracking:
Your visibility tracking includes going back to your website traffic, list growth goals, social media, and media placements.
How well did you do on increasing your visibility to new (and existing!) audience members?
What tactics did you use that worked well? Do you have more of that planned for the next quarter?
Accomplishment Tracking:
Over the last quarter, you've probably made some significant accomplishments. And you have more planned for the next quarter. In accomplishment goals, we include:
- Product or program launches
- Strategy changes (like amplification platform additions or changes)
- System changes (like adding new software)
- Process changes (adding new software or changing team structure)
Again, you'll need to look at the big things you accomplished in the last quarter and their impact on your business. Review what didn't get done that you still need to do, and what can get cut from the list. Did something new come on the scene that you want to take advantage of?
If you have time, you should also evaluate your current systems and processes to ensure that you're doing your most important work.
Planning and Scheduling
Planning and schedulings may be the area in which I advocate spending the least time on your quarterly review. Make sure you know your most significant, most important dates, and then work around those. You'll need to consider:
- Launch dates. Consider any pre-launch teasers you’re going to share as well.
- Applicable holidays. These can be holidays that you'll honor in your business or your customers' celebrating that may affect your business.
- Personal requirements. You may need extra time for personal activities, like vacations. Plan for those too!
Are you going to implement marketing resets in your business? Be sure to sign up for the FREE newsletter and Resource Library to access the Monthly Marketing Reset checklist. You’ll also be the first to know when the Marketing Reset Workshop is available!
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