Now is the perfect time to review your marketing activities over the last 12 months! You can make informed decisions of where to invest your marketing budget when it comes to planning your 2022 marketing strategy. Here we summarise some of the key factors you should include in your 2021 marketing review.
Website
Before you get into the nitty gritty marketing review, it’s always a good idea to check-in with your website. It’s often overlooked, but often one of the top spaces that your customers will visit. It should answer their initial questions:
- What does your business offer?
- How you can help them?
Check through your pages and ensure that all your services/product information are up to date. Ensure you:
- Remove services you no longer offer
- Implement any pricing updates
- Add your latest services
Hopefully, you’ll have already set up Google Analytics and if you haven’t, do it now! It’s a pretty simple process that involves adding a snippet of code to your website and it provides you with a wealth of information. If you look at the overview tab you can get some data on the number of users/ views your website has had over the course of the 12 months. If you look at the Acquisition tab it will break down how that traffic got there.
SEO
If you are working with an agency like Carrick Creative, we would hope that you are getting a monthly SEO report so that you are able to see exactly how your SEO campaign is performing. The focus here should be reporting on the key metrics that matter to your business as this is likely to differ from one to another. Some key aspects you should consider in your SEO report include:
- the position of your keyword listings
- the quality of your content on your pages
- the quality of your backlinks
- are there any broken links?
All software being up to date and your site secure are essential of course.
PPC
Any Google Ads run over the course of the year will influence whether you’ll need to include this in your review. Start by looking at which of your Keywords and Ads resulted in the most clicks to your website. You can also look at which Ads & Keywords converted based on the conversion goals that you set. If there are any Ads that did not perform well, you know to delete those ones and test in some new Ad Text in 2022. Check into your keywords and seeking, are there any additional keywords that can be added to the campaign?
If you are interested in what Google Ads could do for your business, check the keyword planner. It recommends what keywords you use, whether they have high competition and the expected cost that you can expect to pay per click. With this information in mind, you can assess whether this will be a suitable marketing strategy with a good return on investment that you should include in 2022.
Social Media
Social media became even more integral to marketing businesses during the pandemic as everyone strove to seek a connection. Many businesses made use of the opportunity to increase brand awareness, their following and those all-important sales.
You should be looking at your social media insights on a regular basis. It’s a good idea to look at your audience metrics to see who is engaging with you. For example, you see females, aged 25-40, make up the bulk of your audience then create content that appeals to them.
Depending on the social platform you are using there might be some other factors that you should include in your review.
TIP: If you use Instagram it’s always a good idea to investigate your hashtags and update your hashtag bank as and when necessary.
If you have undertaken any social media advertising, as part of your your 2021 marketing review you should:
- review campaigns that performed well
- analyse the targeted audience
- review the budget spent
- creative elements used in the campaign.
By looking at what worked in 2021, you can start to map out what social media advertising campaigns you can focus on creating as we enter 2022.
Of course, there are many other marketing activities that your business could be using. Your 2021 marketing review must be personalised to your business. Kickstart 2022 by making informed decisions to best utilise your budget! Our team at Carrick Creative will be more than happy to help you.