A mid-year review for your content marketing strategy gives you a heads-up about its performance thus far. While some people might approach such a task with the kind of dread that typically accompanies mid-year reviews for employees, not taking the time to do it now could mean wasted time and opportunities if you only do it at the end of the year.
1. Are you still reaching your audience?
Are your efforts still keeping up with the action plan that was developed as part of your content marketing strategy? Make sure that these efforts are reaching your ideal customer. Check to see that the audience you are targeting hasn’t changed due to industry or economic factors.
2. Identify any areas that need to be changed
Has your most successful marketing campaign so far been in shared content – social media, referrals or word of mouth, for example – but your greatest expenditures are aimed toward paid content such as banner ads? If so, it might be time to take a look at evening up the budget a bit so you can build on your successes more easily.
3. Align with your sales team
Check in with your sales team to be sure that the goals of your content marketing campaign match your sales goals. Bring your observations to the next sales meeting to gather data from the front lines of sales to make sure that everyone is aligned toward the same goals.
Connect your marketing analytics to your CRM and capture UTM parameters on forms. Define lifecycle stages the same way across teams, then review influenced pipeline, opportunities, and win rates by content type.
4. Do a refresh and update on your website
If your website has been on autopilot since the beginning of the year, it’s probably overdue for a refresh and update on the content. Even if the content you had up was popular in January, it might not hold the same appeal now that mid year is approaching.
Audit Google’s Core Web Vitals using Search Console or PageSpeed Insights, focusing on LCP, INP, and CLS. INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024, and basic WCAG 2.2 checks like headings, alt text, and contrast help more visitors use your site.
5. Get a handle on the data
The analytics and data gained by parsing your website’s metrics needs to be put to use. GA4 uses an event-based model, so make sure key conversion events, engagement rate, and average engagement time track. Keep UTM tagging consistent across campaigns, and review attribution settings so reports match how your team scores leads. The basic four areas that you need to concentrate on – content downloads, page views, conversion rates and social shares – form the foundation of your marketing strategy.
There’s no doubt about it, your content marketing strategy isn’t something that you can simply forget about once it’s in place. In order to be successful, you need to constantly access and review its effectiveness.
ER Marketing combines numerous core competencies to develop the ideal content marketing strategy for your business. Turning this aspect of its success over to the professionals allows you to concentrate more fully on growing your business. Contact ER Marketing today to learn more.
