Make this Your Best Year Ever: Conduct a Mid-year Marketing Assessment

Marketing Viewpoint by Ruth Winett

Are you making enough progress on your top 2016 marketing objectives? Summer is a good time to assess your marketing objectives and a good time to decide which objectives to keep, which to change, and which to add.

Begin with a situational review. Consider changes in the business climate and in your company's situation and whether those changes mean you should modify your objectives for the year:

Business climate: Do your objectives continue to make sense for your business in the current business environment? Following Brexit, should you establish your first European office in London or another city?
Company situation: Are your objectives realistic considering your company's current situation? If you can't recruit competent customer support staff, delay launching a new support business until you have enough staff.

When you have completed a situational review, consider other factors, such as the following:

Progress to date: How much headway have you made on each of your objectives? What factors have either accelerated or impeded the achievement of each of your objectives? How should you respond? If new customer acquisition rates are slipping, investigate and take corrective measures. You need new customers to grow and to offset customer churn.
Social media: Are your social media campaigns successful? What metrics are you using? What are you learning? How are you responding? Building elaborate spreadsheets that record click rates is useless if no one analyzes the data and no one acts upon the findings.
Other marketing communications: Are your ads, press releases, and other marketing materials reaching the right audience and resonating with this audience? If not, you are missing opportunities and wasting resources.
New objectives for 2016: New products, new competitors, or expanded markets could mean additional objectives, for example, creating a Spanish language website to address prospective customers in Latin America. This means culturally appropriate new content, as well as translated product descriptions.

Nearly half of the year is still ahead. Make it a productive five months. If you decide to change objectives and adopt different strategies and tactics, make sure your team knows about the changes and is fully on board. And, make sure your team has adequate resources.

Winett Associates helps companies understand their customers and markets.

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