Wrapping Up Your Marketing Year

Q4 is a hectic time for most companies. Somewhere between the holiday office party and planning next year’s marketing strategy, you need to wrap up this year’s marketing efforts.  

So, what does that entail?  

From removing old contacts to reviewing the latest social media trends, we’ve put together a list of items you’ll want to check twice before planning for next year.  

How to Wrap Up Your Marketing Year:

1. Clean Up Your Email Lists 
2. Check Your Website Health 
3. Analyze Underperforming Results 
4. Review Notable Trends and Updates 

Clean Up Your Email Lists

Your contact lists can accumulate a lot of dust in a year. People leave jobs, change numbers, and adopt new email addresses. If you don’t stay on top of these changes throughout the year, you’ll be sending your carefully crafted messages to dead ends instead of engaged audience members. 

And while you’re in your email platform, the year-end is also a chance to update your contacts’ status. They might have moved from a prospect to a client or from a general customer to a rewards member, and that’s worth taking note of!  If you’re serious about selling, tracking your customer’s journey through the sales funnel should be essential. 

Have too many contacts to keep track of? Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms like HubSpot make organizing these various groups easy — they can even automate status changes based on actions your audience members take. If this is new to you, we’d be happy to walk you through setup. 

Check Your Website Health

In rolling out your next annual strategy, don’t forget about the housekeeping work. All those exciting campaigns you have planned are meaningless if you’re sending users to a dilapidated site. 

For example, something as seemingly minor as page speed can really drive your hard-earned clickers away. If it takes even 10 seconds to load, a user is 123% more likely to bounce (and that’s just one threat to site health). 

You’ll know your site’s healthy if it ranks well in all three of Google’s Core Web Vitals: Load time, Interactivity, and Visual Stability. If you need some guidance in checking these, we’d be willing to dive in! 

Analyze Underperforming Efforts

Hopefully, last year’s plan included some measurable marketing objectives. Whether your video impressions weren’t up to par, or your email open rate sank, now’s the time to take inventory of which KPIs fell short.   

More importantly, you’ll want to analyze why these efforts underperformed. Not all shortfalls can be summed up to “bad copy” or “ineffective keyword research.” Sometimes there are external marketing factors at play, like a nationwide recession or a platform boycott. Understanding the full context will help you determine if these efforts are really worth ditching. 

Review Notable Trends & Updates

The world of marketing is fast paced. Platforms adopt new features, search engines rewrite algorithms, and tech companies alter privacy —and those are just a few examples. 

Before constructing next year’s strategy, take inventory of these trends and see how your company can take advantage. Publications like Socialmediatoday.com and Searchenginejournal.com exist to keep marketers up to speed. You can also browse our blog for the latest-and-greatest. 

Need assistance with your year-end marketing review? Reach out to the Marketing team here at Informatics. We can help you wrap up your efforts so you can focus on next year. 

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