You’re six months into implementing the year’s marketing plan and you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how to outperform the first half of the year in the months to come. You want more leads, you crave a larger audience and, of course, you want to outsmart the competition. So, where do you start?
Review your website traffic
Where is your website traffic coming from? I don’t just mean geographically. Are people finding your website through organic search? Are you generating a high volume of traffic from referrals? Does your mobile traffic surpass your desktop traffic?
Understanding what is driving your website traffic can help to prioritize your marketing tactics and budgets in order to drive an optimal number of qualified visitors to your site.
Evaluate your email performance
What is your average open rate? Which email topics generate the most opens and clicks? How does the day of the week and time of your send impact performance? Have you done A/B testing with subject lines and sender names – and, if so, what does the data tell you?
Email marketing helps organizations stay on the radar of their stakeholders. Whether sharing company news, offering purchase incentives or driving event registrations, email marketing is an important part of a multi-channel program. Beyond using data from past email marketing to improve future performance, consider how else you can leverage your list of email content in other marketing activities.
Assess your social media performance
Social media ROI can be squishy. What is the value of engagement? How does audience growth impact sales? Simply put, the more trackable the marketing the easier the evaluation. Whether you use tracking links, create dedicated landing pages to drive traffic to or diversify your promotions by marketing channel, there are smart and easy ways to make it easier to evaluate your social media success.
One often overlooked way to improve social media marketing campaigns is to use your organization’s email list to create one or more custom audiences to which you can serve up advertising and sponsored content. This can help to ensure your content is reaching the right audiences, in addition to providing an additional touchpoint with key stakeholders.
Scrutinize your media coverage
Everyone has it – the unexpected media hit and the perfect story that didn’t grab the media’s attention the way you had hoped. Hence, the need for careful analysis. From assessing the effectiveness of various spokespersons to determining which key message points resonate most strongly with media, it is important to identify which types of news generate not only the highest volume of media coverage but also the highest quality media coverage.
Determining the success of a PR/media relations program and how to maximize future successes requires not only looking in but looking out. Have your competitors secured features in media that you aspire to have cover you? What were the missed opportunities? Why didn’t the stories you had the greatest goals for generate the best coverage?
Maintaining a successful marketing program relies on continued evaluation of performance. Waiting 12-months to determine what’s working allows budget to be allocated to under-performing activities and limits the opportunity for improvement.
As you evaluate your organization’s marketing performance during the first half of the year, focus on letting data inform your future strategy and identifying opportunities to replicate successes. Remember, great marketing programs embrace consistency, leverage creativity and drive back to a strategy that lays the foundation for ongoing success.
