Assessing Year-to-Date Progress on Your Marketing Goals

Summer is a great time to assess year-to-date progress on your marketing goals— honing your strategy, tactics, and metrics to finish the year strong. This year, for many organizations, it’s also a pivotal time to demonstrate client value and organizational ROI from your marketing program.

A year that started with a bullish economy, consumer demand barreling up, and labor supplies tight has also seen prices increasing at the highest rates in 40 years. As inflation and recession fears rise, discretionary spending is beginning to decline, market demand is ebbing in some segments, and layoffs are looming for some industries.

It’s an environment in which brand loyalty often takes a back seat to lower pricing and higher value, posing both opportunities and threats for marketing programs. A key opportunity is client willingness to try new products, services, or suppliers if they offer strong value. A key threat is the tendency of leadership to view marketing as a prime candidate for cost-cutting in periods of economic uncertainty.

This summer checklist can help you both enhance your campaign and program performance and provide data to prove the essential value of your organization’s marketing investments.

√ Measurement

• All organizations have gaps in what they are measuring. Identify the most important gaps and develop a plan to collect the data you need.
• Identify the data you need for informed decision making, such as which channels provide the highest ROI. Gather real-time metrics that help you improve results and determine where/how to maximize lead conversions. At a campaign level, that’s often measures like click-through rates, bounce rates, conversions, and lead-to-conversion rates.
• Also identify the measures that matter to leadership and justify marketing expenditures. That can include measures like cost per lead, cost per conversion, and customer lifetime value.
• Take advantage of available Google Analytics capabilities, using tools like Google Tag Manager to track events and conversions more accurately.
• Ensure you can easily view and report on findings and trends. Customized dashboards let you visualize performance, make optimizations in real-time, and share relevant data and trends in intuitive formats.

√ Assessment

•  Take a deep dive into what tactics, channels, and creative have and have not worked.

• Prioritize what’s most effective, and reserve time to test and assess new tactics to increase your reach and conversions. 

√ Customer Relationship Management

• CRM systems can provide a wealth of capabilities and data and are often not used to their full potential.
• Data from customer interactions and touchpoints can help you better understand customers and get a more accurate view of your sales funnel.
• Ensure you’re effectively using list segmentation for targeted marketing and taking advantage of marketing automation tools.
• CRMs are particularly helpful in measuring email performance, including open and click-through rates and conversions.

How Yes& Can Help

Do More with Less: With experts across every facet of integrated marketing, Yes& can cost-effectively augment your internal marketing capacity, whether you need strategic planning, digital campaign development, content marketing, help implementing and dashboarding the right metrics, or help creating effective landing pages, microsites, or a website refresh.

Attract the Right Critical Hires: Even amidst economic uncertainty, talent remains scarce and in demand. Yes& offers proven experience in effectively targeting hard-to-reach audiences, honing brand positioning to attract qualified leads, and crafting a brand story that resonates with prospective employees.