You can get caught up in the minutia of the day to day or in the latest campaign launch and suddenly 4 months have passed and you can't answer small questions about your business growth, easily access links to your latest campaigns and definitively say what's working or what your most read blog article has been.
I discovered this time flying phenomenon in my own marketing! My day to day activities felt like I was drinking from a firehose and suddenly I lost sight of my goals, what was working, and all the little things that can slip through the cracks! In working on our own marketing and with hundreds of small businesses, I developed the 7 things every small business needs to do every month (related to their marketing).
These things may not seem as cool as reviewing your latest funnel or checking out your skyrocketing Instagram following - but they only take about an hour a month and help you keep all your marketing efforts on target!
1. Check Customer Satisfaction
While these aren't in any particular order, I like this being the first thing you review because it determines if you're truly in tune with your audience!
If you are collecting customer feedback, review what feedback you received this past month. It could be as small as someone calling you out on a spelling error in an email (been there!) or as large as a whole order or service not being delivered. No matter what the feedback is (even positive feedback) look at what is affecting that feedback and if there is anything you could to improve customer's experience. If your spelling has been slipping, taking an extra minute to review your work, if a service isn't being delivered, looking into why that happened and what process you can put in place to prevent it in the future.
If you aren't yet collecting customer feedback (we're all guilty of this, so there's no shame!), begin implementing something small like a monthly email to new customers asking them to fill out a survey or reviewing your business on Facebook! You can create a newsletter template in Wavoto and send it each month to contacts tagged "customer" in the past month as part of your new monthly review.
Keep in mind, understanding your customer and specifying who you market to is important. We’ve made determining your ideal audience easy, with our free Discover your Avatar worksheet -
click here to download today!2. Try A New Marketing Tactic
Most of your monthly marketing is reviewing and restrategizing, but this one is all about trying new things! Not only does a new marketing tactic a month help keep your creative juices flowing, but it also helps you test new email times, schedule new events, or anything you can think of!
These can be small, like sending out your newsletter on Thursday evening instead of Thursday morning, or something big, like a whole new campaign, focused on a specific niche of your business.
Trying something new each month allows you to stay connected to your audience and learn more about them. It reminds me of Jenna Kutcher switching up her Instagram images from images of things to images of her and seeing her engagement skyrocket! She learned her audience wanted to see and hear HER more. Imagine what you could learn by just switching something small up?
3. Review Your Website Analytics
This one takes about 10 minutes maximum and can use the free resources you have at your disposal - Google Analytics! While the numbers don't tell you everything, they can point out some oddities that may arise. Metrics we like to track monthly are:
- Pageviews
- Website bounce rate
- Top 5 blog articles
- Newsletter subscribers
- Blog subscribers
- Email open rates
- Email click-through rates
These are not all the metrics you can or should be tracking (they definitely differ depending on your goals), it does give you a good baseline of where things might be changing. Have a lot of new pageviews? That new campaign may be working like a charm! Have a lot of new newsletter subscribers but your open rate has plummeted, take a look at your email subject lines or require a subscriber confirmation email that prompts people to drag your emails into their primary inbox (helping them get seen and therefore opened more frequently).
4. Audit Your Website
Another quick task is quickly combing over your website making sure that all your links go where they need to go, event dates are updated, and everything is working as it should be. This is not about re-doing whole pages or spending hours creating new campaigns, but making sure you know what your website visitors are experiencing and that it still matches your yearly goals.
Recently I was doing this with Wavoto and realized I didn't update one of our landing pages with the new webinar registration date. While this wasn't a huge deal, it made us look unprofessional and we could have lost new leads through a minor confusion. 5-10 minutes can make the difference between new leads or not!
5. Review Your New Marketing Tactic
Now that you're implementing a new marketing tactic a month, take a few moments to review what effect it had on your audience and overall marketing strategy! Change the time you send your weekly newsletter? Check to see if it affected your open rates or click-through rates. You'll be able to determine if the new tactic is making a positive or negative difference or no difference at all!
6. Report On Your Monthly Finances
I have seen friends experience it and, heck, I've experienced it myself. Suddenly you look at your credit card and a subscription is still charging each month or a charge appears you never made. By checking your finances every month you can make sure:
- You're not keeping subscriptions that you aren't using.
- You're not experiencing fraudulent charges.
- You're spending your money wisely. Maybe you use 5 online platforms where 2 will work or you have extra money to spend on a VA to help manage your email every month.
Keeping a tab on where your money is going doesn't let things get out of hand and can even open your time up for new and better things!
7. Check-In On Your Monthly, Quarter, and Yearly Goals
Last but certainly not least, check-in with the monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals you have set. Are you on track to reach that yearly goal? You can know!
Maybe you don't have goals, you can spend a moment each month using your numbers to help create goals. Maybe you're getting one new customer per month, you can challenge yourself to get 3 more customers the following month and try a new marketing tactic to achieve that goal!
These 7 simple monthly marketing tasks allow you to stay on top of where your business is going, what's working or not working and see a bird's eye view of what's going on with your business. From learning more about your customer's experience, who your audience is, and how you are connecting with them, it allows you to grow into what's working well and move away from following with what your competitors are doing.