Step-by-Step 90-Day Marketing Review and Audit
Reading Time: 5 minutes The world of social media and marketing constantly evolves. Thus, it’s not always easy to predict what will happen next, even more so after a global pandemic.
Every 90 days, my team and I examine what is working and what needs to shift.
Social media platforms constantly change, and algorithms shift periodically. Trends and industries pivot now faster than ever before. Yet, just like baking some good bread, the best sourdough starter takes time to develop.
Ninety days may sound like an odd number, but it allows us to implement new things, then go out and test them, and eventually refine them and consolidate them if they’re working.
I’m not against monthly reviews. However, I feel like they can put a lot of pressure, especially when working in a small team. Thoroughly reviewing your efforts every quarter has immense benefits:
Why auditing AND reviewing? Because reviewing allows you to look at what is working and what is not working. An audit looks at the different areas of your strategies and looks for implementations.
Looking at the bigger picture
What do you want to look for when running a 90-day marketing strategy audit and review?
Before going in-depth with our overall look at the current marketing strategy, we take one step back and outline the business direction for the next 90 days.
When it comes to doing a better strategy and overview, we ask ourselves some key questions, which I wanted to share with you – it might be a more holistic approach to marketing strategy, but it works for us.
These are some of the questions we look at, even before opening our metrics:
As we update our content calendar, we must be aware of creative ways to tie in our journey.
After that, we outline our critical dates and the general campaigns or awareness days for the coming 90 days.
These will help us shape a simple monthly content calendar every 30 days.
Don’t forget to also take some time to review and audit your social media presence as well as the content. A simple 3-step audit can help you align your accounts to your current needs.
Learn more about the smart tactics and current trends in content marketing.
Analyzing the data to refine metrics
Look at the data: you want to examine your targets closely. And what you have been tracking and measuring, and see if they are helping you get closer to the goals you’re trying to reach.
Assessing that first will allow you to spot blind areas that need your attention right now.
If your email stats are going through the roof and produce results, there is no reason for you not to keep doing what you’re doing.
However, if you see patterns changing, you might want to ask yourself what you’re producing that is not currently working.
We split our stats into specific areas, including social media content, email marketing, and overall marketing messaging and direction.
Find the marketing areas that are key to your growth that you want to oversee and track.
We ask ourselves specific questions, no matter what.
Before thinking about what to do based on your answers, choose for each of them up to three or four metrics that you think can be relevant for the next 90 days – our metrics tend to shift every six months to a year.
Be open to changing your metrics when you need to adapt to what will bring you the best results. After that, we make sure to look at the different areas and find one course of action we can take.
Suppose we find that any of these is not performing at its best. Instead of throwing everything out the window and seeing what sticks, we make sure we think about one implementation.
Look at the metrics now and ask yourself:
Time to implement
There could be countless reasons some areas of your marketing are suffering.
However, I want to give you the ones that most often I see people struggling with:
If your marketing messaging and identity have changed, your social media will not perform well. Whether you are creating Reels, going live on Instagram, or engaging like a MOFO, nothing will give you the desired results.
If you’re not talking to the right audience anymore, or your audiences have changed or shifted, people will just not be engaging with you.
Look at what comes up and set up one implementation for each area.
We focus on one change we can make and set a new goal for ourselves. I also find that the people around you will be motivated if you ask them to focus on one significant shift for the coming 90 days.
I firmly believe that creating a straightforward implementation for each area of marketing can help keep conversations streamlined. The changes you are making will affect your relationship with your audience – who are human beings like yourself.
If you’re marketing to humans and not machines, you need to start thinking like them.
