How to Make a Mid-Year Marketing Review Worth Your Time

• Updated on: 2019-06-21
• Read original article here

We’re big advocates of setting SMART marketing goals at the beginning of the year.

If you happen to work with HubSpot, or a HubSpot agency, setting goals can be even more lucrative due to the platform’s extensive set of tools for setting and tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The tools let you set KPI benchmarks when your company first dreams up its marketing goals at the beginning of the year (which you can read more about here), then, measure their progress in real-time.

For marketers that haven’t yet adopted HubSpot, you can still perform a mid-year check on your KPIs to ensure your marketing program is working well and right. In this blog, we’re exploring the critical importance of setting the right KPIs and what to do if your check-in reveals that your marketing program is, or isn’t, working.

Monitoring KPIs is vital because it’s the only real way to track progress toward your marketing goals. Ideally, you’ll have benchmarked your KPIs at the beginning of Q1 so you can monitor improvement and set some objective numbers that reflect appropriate progress towards your goals for each quarter. If you weren’t able to get an original measurement of your KPI before launching your marketing program, it’s not too late! This can be a chance for you to set new goals and to monitor the progress that your marketing efforts have made in the time between when you started implementing new tactics and now.

Six-month KPI data is useful because it reveals:

Depending on your focus for the next six months, what you look for and discuss as you check in on KPI data at the end of Q2 will vary, but we’ve determined the most important components of any mid-year marketing check-in, so that you don’t leave out any important observations.

Typically, reviewing marketing KPIs reveal a blend of successes and failures. Some goals will have been easier to meet than others, while unforeseen circumstances could have caused your company to move away from certain efforts or tactics you thought would be important at the start of the year. Even if your company hit all the numbers it aspired to, some goals had to be easier to meet than others.

If you not only met, but far surpassed all of the goals you set at the beginning of Q1, pause before you celebrate. Too easily reaching and surpassing goals means that they may not have been enough of a stretch in the first place. In order to really achieve growth and move forward, the goals you set need to present a formidable challenge. If you’re a Jim Collins fan, like me, you’re likely aware of BHAGs, otherwise known as “big hairy audacious goals” that are proven to motivate, unify and engage teams in ways that no highly attainable goal ever can.

So, as you set your goals for the next quarter and for the end of the year, take a lesson from the BHAG concept and set them beyond what feels like a reasonable reach. You’ll find that even if you don’t reach them, your company will rise to the challenge in unexpectedly beneficial ways.

As we alluded to above, the events of the last six months may have influenced the way you think about the goals you’ve set and the tactics you’re using. It may be tempting to just reset your goals with higher KPI numbers and keep moving forward, but if you do that, you risk missing out on one of the important purposes of performing a six-month check-in to begin with: resetting and refocusing.

As you check in on your marketing KPIs, think about if the tactics you’re using are still taking your company to where it needs to go. Ask yourself…

New platforms and tools may have emerged that can help you change your approach and do more to build relationships with prospects and customers and support company-wide objectives.

Your KPI data not only lets you know how your marketing efforts are performing, but let’s you know if there are next steps you haven’t worked into your marketing plan but need to take to maximize results.

Here’s some guidance on how to take your KPI data to the next level:

A year of efforts towards driving up the same KPI can be squandered if you never take the next step, so the six-month mark is the perfect time to shift into high gear. For instance, if you set a goal to raise form fills and lead conversions in Q1, you won’t make the most of those leads if you don’t put effort towards the next step of expanding and improving upon your email marketing campaigns.

Think of your six-month check-in of your marketing KPIs as being as much about re-orienting your plans as it is about monitoring the progress you’ve made. You want to make changes to your plans and objectives so that the hard work you and your team have put in over the last six months doesn’t go to waste, and that involves using KPI data to direct your next moves. With the right objectives, there’s no marketing goal you can’t meet.