By Hope Koonin

If you’re unfamiliar with the details of a year-end review or looking to improve your assessments, look no further. Thanks to Marketing Choices, you can break down the year-end marketing review process into easy, practical steps. 

Using Your Marketing Tools: The Importance of The Year-End Review

Whether working with a marketing team or flying solo, you can’t ignore the importance of a year-end review. Reviewing your performance helps gauge your current marketing leadership, and you can use it to plan future marketing strategies. 

What is a year-end review? A year-end review is a process businesses use to see what worked and what didn’t during a period of time. Reviews can be compared to a checklist that covers marketing channels you’ve interacted with over the past year. 

A year-end review is important as it helps your business stay up to date. A thorough review will help you catch any outdated displays, advertisements, or about pages. More vitally, the review will help you find weak spots in your marketing. Dealing with these can help you eliminate cost-sucking tactics from your precious marketing budget. Year-end reviews especially benefit businesses. Your gathered data and marketing trends will clarify successes, which you can build next year’s marketing practices upon. 

You’ll want to keep in mind three general steps for the review process: 

• Collecting data
• Analyzing data
• Interpreting data

Sounds simple, right? Although the year-end review has more detailed steps, you’ll find that everything falls into one of these categories.

Data-Driven Marketing: Conducting the Year-End Review

The year-end review can be divided into steps or categories. The largest category has to do with collecting and analyzing various data.

Data Analysis

You will want to collect data from all of your marketing channels. It may be easier to deal with the data by compiling it into a comprehensive report. Once you collect the information, you can conduct a marketing performance analysis. Look for successes, failures, outlines, and trends from each marketing channel. Different channels may run at different intervals. With a data report, you can evaluate from a year-long perspective. If you have a previous year’s review, you can also compare results to see what has changed.

Campaign Evaluation

Part of your data analysis process should include a marketing campaign evaluation. Keep in mind that success may look different for each campaign. What matters most is your Return on Investment (ROI). Ask yourself key questions. Did you get bang for your buck? Was a campaign more costly to organize than it ended up being worth? Did what you put into a campaign bring you satisfactory results? Use marketing ROI to find a campaign’s rate of success, and use it to inform next year’s goals.

Channel Performance

For your business, you likely use more than one marketing strategy. These can include SEO, social media, email lists, and more. Through analyzing each individual channel, you can figure out each method’s effectiveness. Is engagement higher in one than another? Are you seeing interactions by customers with multiple channels at a time? When you analyze channel performance, you’ll want to keep each channel’s varying factors in mind. 

Don’t Forget Customer Insights

While not as easy to evaluate as numerical trends, customer insights are a crucial piece of data. You will want to know why customers prefer you and how to keep them engaged with your business. One great way to learn more about your customers is by asking them directly. Conduct surveys throughout or at the end of the year and use the data to help you. It’s important to take criticism and praise from customers to get the most effective feedback. Find what isn’t working and improve.

Marketing Analytics: Key Takeaways

Once you’ve collected and analyzed your data, consider the highs and lows of the year. What can you take away from it? What successful campaigns can you re-use? What channels need to be experimented with? Is your brand working, or do you need to rework it? Consider your data as a whole, but also recall the general category your business falls under. What are general business trends for your category, and how can you use your resources to take advantage?

Marketing channel optimization is also important. If you are unfamiliar with the term, marketing channel optimization means focusing on ways to make channels more successful. To do this, you consider Key Performance Indicators (KPI) or distinct factors that you can measure. For example, click-through rates and email subscriptions are marketing KPIs. You can apply single (focusing on one channel) or cross-channel optimization (someone interacting with multiple channels). By focusing on one factor across channels, or one factor in only one channel, you can gather more detailed data. This can help you analyze success more specifically. 

Since you are dealing with multiple channels and large amounts of data, you can find ways to make things easier. To make data collection simpler, you can apply marketing software to collect customer interactions with KPI. Some marketing tactics, such as welcome emails, can use marketing automation. By applying these techniques, you can free up space for important tasks. Such techniques will also keep your data more organized for year-end reviews.

Marketing Goal Setting: Act on Your Review 

To turn your analysis into action, make and follow SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. 

• Specific: Instead of wide-sweeping, vague goals, opt for specific goals. Choose something you want to improve on, and keep it specific.
• Measurable: Find or choose a way to measure success. Depending on your goal, the way you measure success may differ.
• Achievable: Make sure that your goal is specific and small enough that you can realistically achieve it. Lay out a game plan with specific steps to give you the best chance for success.
• Relevant: When planning, keep your goal in mind! Your steps should stay focused and tie directly back to your goal.
• Time-Bound: Plan a specific amount of time for your goal to be achieved. This will help you quantify success.

You might decide on a specific goal each month or each quarter. Try not to overwhelm yourself with too many goals. By keeping your goals SMART, you may find it easier to act on them.

Marketing: Best Practices for Long-Term Improvement

By following these strategies and steps, you should discover a clear and doable year-end process. Marketing Choices recommends that you take the time you need to complete your year-end review. If done effectively, your year-end review may positively impact the effectiveness of future years. 

If you have questions or want more assistance with your year-end review, contact us.