RE-EVALUATING YOUR MARKETING.

A new financial year always provides a time of reflection and anticipation of what’s to come over the course of the next 12 months across all aspects of one’s business.

Unlike some of the larger brands we work with who have stand alone marketing teams, we find that SME’s and bricks and mortar proprietors such as the dealerships we work with, the small one percenters in marketing can fall by the way side over the course of a year, when things get busy. Which is why a new financial year can be a great time to take a deep breath, stand back and evaluate your last 12 months.

Some of the things we look at with our clients around this time of year are:

• Spend vs. Reward per month.

• Custom audience updating.

• Landing page configuration.

• Pixel health.

• First party data build up.

• Conversion metrics testing.

• Phone enquiry volume up or down.

• Footfall traffic.

• Website sales.

• Checking basic things like cost per click year on year.

• Reach and Frequency vs. last year.

• Geo targeting set up – are we being effective.

• Competitor targeting both brand and local.

This information is valuable as it allows us to choose different platforms at different times to ensure messaging is effective for that time of year and always having ROI top of mind.

As an example, we see our cost per phone call and cost per leads fluctuate a great deal with outdoor clients especially. Given the seasonality of their business.

We change our strategy in the winter months to move away from phone call acquisition to be more website led or to build awareness at the start of the buying journey to fill the pipe line for spring.

It’s not just a matter of reducing spend because things are a bit more quiet. You still want your spend to be effective, no matter how big or small that spend is. However if the call volume isn’t here, you want to shift budget into other areas where it will be more effective.

Another thing to consider at this time of year are marketing budgets based on your previous profit and loss, upcoming model releases, mortgage rates and overall market sentiment.

All of this information can help with how we flight our media over the course of a year and what channels we use at certain times. Do we hold back budget in certain months to go harder in others and what are the business signals you can see that allow you to make these changes.

So use this time, to look at what you've been doing and what you need to do to succeed. You will be surprised that less can be more with local area marketing. You might want to focus on one things and do that oen things very well instead of trying to spread yourself too thin.

Author - Trent Collett

Company Director - SHOVE Communications