Mid-Year Digital Marketing Check-Up: How To Assess Your Strategy

A mid-year marketing check-in allows you to revise key strategies to support your overall business goals better.

By reassessing objectives and KPIs, and taking a complete overview of your marketing strategy, you can make adjustments that lead to greater ROI in the latter half of the year.

In this guide, we’ll talk about what you need to complete a mid-year marketing check-in, and how it will help.

Review your Marketing Goals and KPIs

At least twice a year, you should be evaluating your marketing strategy, how it aligns with business goals and its success at achieving them.

Over time, new trends and patterns emerge. With regular audits, you can adjust reactively to these and reassess Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to match new targets. Mid-year marketing checkups help you stay ahead of potential issues and tighten up your strategy for improved return on investment (ROI).

How to Review Performance Metrics

Marketing KPIs are commonly based on figures such as:

• Website Traffic
• Customer acquisition costs
• Conversion Rates
• Lead generation rates
• ROI

By comparing their actual performance to your desired KPIs, you can see how successful your current marketing strategies are.

If there are notable gaps between the results you hoped to achieve and the results you are achieving, the mid-year marketing checkup is the time to assess why this might be.

For example, if you are a SaaS business that wanted to increase organic traffic in the first half of the year by 25%, but only improved by 10%; there’s a clear issue that needs addressing.

How to Adjust Goals and KPIs

A complete audit should reveal plenty of valuable information and actionable insights into your current successes and failures. These should then guide the marketing plan for the rest of the year.

Maybe your free demonstration isn’t getting as many leads as you’d expect, for example. This allows you to review why and trial different copy, CTAs and overall approach to see what resonates better.

If a particular piece of content, or a product is instrumental in gaining new customers, focus on and see how you can structure your marketing to complement this success. Simple product migration strategies could help move customers seamlessly from a free trial or basic offering to a more premium service.

By changing your marketing strategy at the mid-year check-up to reflect this, you can maximise your results. That could be:

• Adjusting KPIs around upselling or upgrades
• Developing tailored nurture campaigns
• Creating additional content to support lesser-performing products

With these strategic adjustments, you can ensure your marketing remains focused on what’s working while addressing areas in need of improvement for stronger overall performance.

Analyse your Audience and Marketing Trends

Understanding your target audience and the product market is essential to a solid marketing strategy.

Customer behaviour evolves for many reasons – take the advent of AI, for instance. There can be sudden, large shifts in behaviour, cultural context and tool design because of this. To show your business as one that’s current and evolving, you need to stay on top of these trends.

For example: Businesses like Thomas International, and other SaaS platforms now feature their AI capabilities in key features.

Understanding how these things impact your own product’s space in the market is important. It helps in forming new KPIs and keeping your marketing targeted and relevant.

How to Collect Data on Audience Behaviour and Preferences

As big fans of using data to drive decisions, we use a combination of tools and tactics to evaluate audience behaviours:

Analytics tools:
Social media insights, CRM systems and information gleaned from analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, heatmaps, Hubspot etc. all help inform you of audience behaviour.

Using them you can track and gather crucial information like:

• Engagement rates
• Bounce rates
• Conversion paths/User journeys
• Demographic data
• Interests and job types

Customer feedback:

Alongside actionable facts and figures, listening to your audience directly and collecting qualitative data is also important. Surveys, reviews and testimonials provide clear insight into pain points and customer values that can change how you position your product or service.

Social listening:

Monitoring conversations about your brand or market on different platforms lets you gauge where your product sits in the industry. You can use tools to track trending topics, or direct mentions to help provide a clear picture of customer sentiment on the current market.

How to Adjust Your Strategy Based on Audience Insights

Once you’ve gathered your information, the next step is making informed adjustments to your strategy. That includes:

Tailoring your messaging: Adjust and A/B test different CTAs, types of long-form content, alternate headlines and ad copy to see what your audience identifies best with. Use your audience research to highlight how your product or service addresses pain points and offers useful features.

Optimising content: See which content types are performing best, and what content is pivotal to the user journey. Produce more of the content that your audience is engaging with.

Reallocating resources: Adjust budgets and funnels to better prioritise resources where they’re most effective. For example, switching focus to a social platform that’s yielding better results, or putting more time into your email marketing if it has a higher ROI. Likewise, adding additional budget to effective campaigns like PPC ads for better return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

Test and adapt: Continual monitoring and adapting outside of the mid-year check-in is key to firming up your strategy and taking advantage of your most effective marketing channels.

Evaluate the Performance of Your Marketing Channels

Looking at your key performance metrics across the board is a key part of your mid-year check-in, but you should also be considering them contextually, by channel.

By reviewing the platforms individually, you can see which are driving the best results and which are underperforming. That way you can reallocate budgets and resources effectively.

For example, platforms that drove significant traffic at the start of the year may not still be your best seller by mid-way through. It’s about adapting to the changes in the market trends.

How to Analyse Channel Performance

Key metrics to consider include:

• Traffic
• Engagement
• Conversion rates
• Return on investment

Or, in the case of PPC ad metrics:

• Cost-per-acquisition
• Cost- per-conversion
• Clickthrough rate
• ROAS

Comparing these to your original goals and benchmarks provides a clear picture of where you should be focussing time and marketing effort.

How to Optimise Marketing Channel Performance

Now you have a good idea of what’s performing and how to effectively adjust your strategy, it’s time to optimise your marketing channels.

If your channel is underperforming, consider shifting your budget and resources elsewhere and pausing any major campaigns that are resisting any optimisation efforts.

If your channel is performing well, see how you can scale and expand the outreach on that platform. That could be posting more frequently, increasing the number of paid ads, or funnelling more budget behind existing popular ads.

Assess Content Strategy and Execution

Content is an essential part of any B2B marketing funnel. It increases brand awareness, builds trust and authority, engages with your audience and supports SEO.

Content should be reviewed at the mid-year check-in to assess its performance and look for any new opportunities or refinements to improve lead generation.

How to Evaluate Your Content’s Effectiveness

Typical metrics to assess the success of content include:

• Reach: What platforms is it performing on and how far is it reaching across your audience?
• Engagement: Are people sharing, liking and clicking through to your content?
• Conversion: Is your late-stage funnel content (demos, product comparisons etc.) leading to conversion?
• Formats and types: Content can be a social post, article, whitepaper, infographic, video etc. There are many content types you can use to improve ROI, but depending on your audience some formats might be more successful than others.

Adjusting Your Content Strategy Based on Findings

Once you’ve identified which content performs well and which falls short, it’s time for optimisation:

• Look at your internal linking: Content could be suffering from its lack of signposting. If you expect a piece to perform better than it is, complete a review of your internal links. Internal links tell search engines why content is important to your pillar topics and improve your overall ranking and visibility. They also signpost to your users where to go next, improving user experience and encouraging retention.
• Focus on high-performing content: If a particular format is consistently driving views and engagement, consider expanding your resources in this area. For example, if video content outperforms articles, consider funnelling more time and resources into video production.
• Look at your topic clusters: If particular sections or sub-sections of content are outperforming similar counterparts, look at expanding that section to address pain points and showcase authority.

High-quality content can drive 177% profit on average, making it one of the most effective tactics in your marketing arsenal.

Review Budget and Resource Allocation

Keeping on top of your budget means you can reactively adjust campaigns and channel promotions depending on how well they’re performing. A mid-year check-up allows you to evaluate how well your spending aligns with your marketing goals and evaluate your overall efficiency.

Identifying areas of overspending and understanding lets you reallocate your budget for the best-performing campaigns and marketing strategies.

How To Review Your Budget

First, compare your actual spend to your expected spend for each channel, campaign or strategy.

From there, you need to assess if the returns are outperforming the spending – which they need to be.

The easiest way to work this out is by assessing one or some of the following:

• Return on investment (ROI): Review your spending and use an ROI calculator to assess the profitability of your digital marketing strategy. This doesn’t need to be a monetary figure, you just need to be able to show that the value of the time you’re inputting into that particular platform or campaign is worth the payoff.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): Determine how much you’re spending to acquire a new customer for each channel. If one platform has a significantly higher CPA than others, it’s time to reallocate the budget.
• Campaign performance: Identify which campaigns are performing the best and what you can do to capitalise on them.

Plan For the Rest of the Year

Once you’ve established current performance and optimisations of existing strategies, it’s time to look at planning out the rest of the year.

Based on these insights you can devise new strategies, and tactics and make changes to further optimise your ROI and ROAS.

How To Implement Your New Plan

We’ve already discussed resource reallocation, shifting budgets and channel optimisation; but there are other things to consider when looking forward to the next 6 months of marketing:

• New campaigns: As well as capitalising on what exists, you also want to try new ideas and strategies. Using information on what platforms and strategies have been effective so far, you can develop new campaigns and PPC ads that will improve your brand’s reach and conversion rate.
• Adjusting your content calendar: Reworking your content strategy and looking for further optimisations on existing content is hugely beneficial. Prioritise topics that do well and create a solid content plan that supports each stage of the user journey.
• Refine KPIs: Importantly, the mid-year check-in is the time to adjust and refine your KPIs for the latter half of the year.

These should be specific, measurable and relate directly to your new and existing initiatives.

As always, however, the mid-year review is not the only time you should be checking in on your marketing. Throughout the year you should be doing monthly reports and audits of campaigns, SEO strategy and content marketing tactics.

This monitoring should lead to careful data-driven adjustments to get the most out of your marketing across the year. Testing and experimentation can lead to new ideas and sometimes, striking gold on a new line of copy or marketing that speaks to your target audience.

Having both structure and flexibility is key to a solid marketing plan.

Conclusion: The Importance of a Mid-Year Marketing Check-Up

A thorough mid-year marketing check-up is not just an opportunity to assess past performance, but also to refine your strategy moving forward.

With regular audits and reviews of key metrics, you can optimise cross-channel promotion and realign your goals for maximum impact.

In doing so, you keep your marketing efforts on track and can approach the second half of the year with confidence.

But if you need help with your review, or marketing support in general, you can always reach out to Common Ground. We can assess your campaigns, provide new strategies and SEO, and support your PPC efforts, helping drive future business growth.