End of year digital marketing check up
- Know your winning platforms
- Be realistic with your assessment
- Drop the ones that aren’t working
- Look at your analytics
- Create a new strategy
We are so close to the end of the year. If you’re like us, you’re probably scrambling to get things sorted before Christmas — both at home and at work. The To Do list is probably overwhelming (we know ours is!) but there is one aspect you need to look at, too. Now is the best time to go through your year and take a hard look at your digital marketing strategy. In this post, we will give you a guide on how to do a post mortem of your year.
The winning platforms
List the platforms you used for things like online advertising, marketing and social media. Go through the analytics of your platforms and look at which ones were hitting your targets. Remember that the targets are not always the same for each platform. It could be that your target was awareness of your brand. Or maybe education about a service you introduced this year. It could be to sell more of a certain product/service. Because your targets were different you need to measure the results differently as well. But be pragmatic about it. If you were on three or four social media platforms but only one or two are giving you the best results drop the others.
Assess the losing platforms
Yes, you should drop the platforms and the advertising avenues that aren’t working but before you do that, assess it first. Why were they not effective? Were the messages wrong for that platform? Were you posting during the wrong time? Or maybe you didn’t post enough. Did you target the right people? Maybe you didn’t put enough budget for the advertising campaign on platform X? Whatever the reasons are, you need to find out so you don’t make the same mistake. Make it a teachable moment for you and your staff.
The right messages
Finally, look at the messages that were winning this year. Which ones got a lot of engagements and shares? What format worked best? Was it video? Maybe a slideshow? Was it the carousel one? What kind of message moves your customers to make that click? Look at your analytics and find out so you can create a content strategy around that for the following year. Having said that, you also need to be on the lookout for what’s going to ‘trend’ next year. Plan as much as you can but also make room for flexibility when things change (yet again) next year.
Brenda Gaddi is a serial entrepreneur. “Give it a go” is her motto for life. She started 3C Digital to give small business owners like herself the chance to harness the power of social media in growing their business. So far, so good…