We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and I genuinely don’t know where this year has gone! We’ll be heading into the final few months of the year, thinking about Christmas, year-end targets and, dare I say it, starting to make plans for next year.
Before we get there, though, I think this is a really good time to stop and take stock of your marketing. When I say stop, I don’t mean disappearing into a meeting room for half a day, creating endless spreadsheets or producing a 30-page report that nobody is ever going to read again. I mean taking just 15 minutes to look at what you’ve been doing over the last few months and ask a few sensible questions about what’s working, what isn’t, and where your attention should go next. Think of it as your Q4 Marketing MOT.
As business owners, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in doing marketing. We post on LinkedIn because it’s Tuesday. We send an email because we haven’t sent one for a while. We attend a networking meeting, update a page on the website, write a blog, try a new piece of software or decide that perhaps we really should be making more videos.
Before long, we’re doing an awful lot of marketing activity, but we haven’t necessarily stopped to ask whether all of that activity is taking us where we actually want to go. So, make yourself a cuppa, find somewhere relatively quiet and give me 15 minutes. There are no complicated calculations involved and you certainly don’t need to be a marketing expert. All I want you to do is answer the following ten questions as openly as you can.
By the end, you should have a much clearer idea of what you want to stop, continue and scale as we head into Q4.
1) What were you actually trying to achieve?
This might sound like an obvious place to start, but you’d be surprised how often marketing activity happens without a clear objective sitting behind it. Think back over the last three months. What did you actually want your marketing to achieve?
Perhaps you wanted more enquiries, greater awareness of your business, more traffic to your website or to grow your email database. Maybe you launched a new service, wanted to enter a different market, generate more repeat business or simply become more visible to the type of customers you’d really like to work with. Whatever it was, write it down.
If you’re sitting there thinking, “Actually, I’m not sure we had a specific objective”, that’s okay too. You’ve already learned something useful from your MOT. Going into Q4, you can make sure you know exactly what you want your marketing to help you achieve. Without that destination, it’s very difficult to know whether your marketing is taking you in the right direction.
2) Where have your enquiries actually come from?
Now think about the enquiries and new customers you’ve had over the last quarter. Do you know how they found you? Perhaps they came through Google, LinkedIn, your website, an email campaign, a networking event or a recommendation from an existing client. It might be that somebody has been quietly following your content for months before finally getting in touch.
You don’t necessarily need sophisticated tracking software to start learning from this. One of the simplest things any business can do is ask every new enquiry, “How did you hear about us?”
Have a look at the answers you already have and see whether you can spot any patterns. If three of your best enquiries came from referrals, for example, that tells you something. If people regularly tell you they’ve been reading your LinkedIn posts before contacting you, that tells you something too. The important thing is to start connecting your marketing activity with what happens next.
3) Which marketing activity has worked particularly well?
This is where I want you to look beyond simply asking, “Which social post got the most likes?” Think about all the different marketing activity you’ve carried out during Q3 and consider which pieces produced a genuinely useful response. Perhaps an email prompted several customers to reply. Maybe a LinkedIn post started a conversation that eventually became an enquiry. A blog might be attracting people to your website through Google, or an event could have introduced you to somebody who has since become an important contact.
The biggest number isn’t necessarily the biggest success. A post with thousands of views might look fantastic on a report, but one thoughtful piece of content that reaches the right person and starts a meaningful conversation could be considerably more valuable to your business.
Look for the marketing that is helping people move a little closer to knowing, trusting and ultimately buying from you.
4) What content has your audience responded to?
Have a scroll back through the content you’ve shared over the last few months. Look at your social posts, emails, blogs and anything else you’ve put out there. Which subjects seem to have connected with people?
Perhaps your practical “how to” posts consistently perform well, or your audience enjoys seeing what happens behind the scenes in your business. Maybe customer stories generate conversations, your opinion pieces receive comments or your educational emails attract more clicks.
Rather than concentrating on one successful post, look for patterns. Those patterns are incredibly useful because they tell you what your audience wants more of. And that makes planning your Q4 content considerably easier.
5) How is your email marketing looking?
Email is one of those marketing channels that can quietly slip down the priority list, particularly when social media feels much more immediate. But your email database is incredibly valuable because it gives you a way of communicating directly with people who have already shown an interest in your business.
So, when did you last email them? Are you communicating consistently or only when you have something to sell? Which emails have people opened, clicked on or replied to? Is your database growing? And, importantly, are you giving people something genuinely useful when you arrive in their inbox? If your answer to the first question is, “I can’t remember when we last sent an email”, please don’t beat yourself up about it. Your Marketing MOT has simply uncovered an opportunity for Q4 and the year ahead. That’s exactly what this exercise is for.
6) Is your website doing its job?
For many businesses, almost every marketing route eventually leads back to the website, so it deserves a few minutes of your attention too. Take a look at which pages people are visiting, where your enquiries are coming from and whether your most important products or services are easy to find. If you have access to your website analytics, great, but there’s also a much simpler test you can do.
Open your homepage and look at it as though you have never seen it before. Within five seconds, can you understand who the business helps, what it does and what you should do next? We become so familiar with our own websites that it can be very difficult to see them through a potential customer’s eyes. If the message isn’t immediately clear, add it to your Q4 list.
7) What are you doing simply because you’ve always done it?
Now we get to one of my favourite questions. Businesses naturally develop marketing habits. We post on a particular social platform because that’s where we’ve always posted. We pay for a directory listing because we’ve had it for years. We attend an event because it’s always been in the calendar.
But marketing time and budgets are precious, particularly for SMEs, so every now and again it’s worth challenging those habits. Ask yourself this: if we weren’t already doing this, knowing what we know now, would we choose to start doing it today? If the answer is no, I’m not suggesting you immediately cancel everything! But I would certainly put it in the “needs a closer look” pile.
8) What’s taking a lot of time without giving much back?
Not every marketing activity needs to result in an immediate sale. I want to make that really clear. Good marketing also builds awareness, trust, credibility and relationships, and some of those things take time to translate into commercial results. However, you should still understand why you’re doing something.
If an activity is consuming hours every week, or taking a sizeable chunk of your marketing budget, ask whether the return justifies the investment. Is it helping with awareness? Generating conversations? Driving website visits? Creating enquiries? If you can’t identify the role it plays, it may be time to rethink how much time, money or energy you’re putting into it.
9) What should you do MORE of?
I think this is a question businesses sometimes forget to ask. When we’re planning marketing, there’s a huge temptation to look for the next new thing. Should we join another social platform? Start a podcast? Try some advertising? Use a new AI tool? Launch another campaign Sometimes the biggest marketing opportunity isn’t something new at all. It’s sitting inside something you’re already doing.
If your emails consistently generate conversations, perhaps you should send them more regularly. If a particular subject performs brilliantly on social media, explore it in more depth. If referrals bring you fantastic customers, perhaps it’s time to become more deliberate about asking for them.
Rather than continually adding more to your marketing workload, look at what is already showing signs of working and ask yourself what might happen if you gave it a little more attention.
10) What are your three priorities for Q4?
You’ve reached the end of your Marketing MOT, so now we need to turn everything you’ve discovered into something useful. Look back through your answers and choose three marketing priorities for Q4. I deliberately say three because I know how tempting it is to create a huge list. We start with “improve our email marketing” and somehow end up with a new website, five social platforms, a podcast, three lead magnets and a weekly video series on the plan! Be realistic about the time and resources you actually have available.
Your three priorities could look something like this:
- Build our email database: We’ll create a genuinely useful downloadable resource and make sure we’re consistently giving people opportunities to join our mailing list.
- Generate more enquiries through LinkedIn: We’ll commit to sharing useful content twice a week and spend more time engaging and having conversations rather than simply posting and disappearing.
- Improve website conversion: We’ll review our key service pages, make the messaging clearer and strengthen our cta’s.
Suddenly, your Q4 marketing plan starts to feel much more manageable.
Now decide what you’ll stop, continue and scale
There’s one final part to your 15-Minute Q3 Marketing MOT. Take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns: STOP, CONTINUE and SCALE.
- Under STOP, write down the marketing activity that is no longer earning its place. Perhaps it’s taking too much time, isn’t supporting your objectives or simply isn’t reaching the right people.
- Under CONTINUE, capture the activity that is doing its job. It might not need more investment at the moment, but it deserves to remain part of your marketing mix.
- Finally, under SCALE, identify the things that are showing enough promise that they deserve more attention, resource or budget during Q4.
That’s it. No enormous marketing report and no complicated dashboard required. Just 15 minutes, 10 questions and three decisions that can give your Q4 marketing a much clearer sense of direction.
What happens next?
The point of reviewing your marketing isn’t to create another document that gets saved in a folder and forgotten about. It’s to help you make better decisions about where your time, energy and marketing budget go next. Sometimes an outside perspective can be incredibly useful. When you’re immersed in your business every day, it can be difficult to see what’s missing, which opportunities you’re overlooking or which activity you’ve simply become accustomed to doing.
At Creationz Marketing, that’s a big part of what I do. I work with SMEs to take all the different pieces of their marketing and join them together, whether that’s through strategic consultancy, support with a particular project or ongoing outsourced support.
So, if your 15-Minute Marketing MOT has left you with a page full of scribbles, a few lightbulb moments and perhaps one or two areas you’re not quite sure what to do with, get in touch. We can take what you’ve discovered, work out what really deserves your attention and turn it into a practical Q4 marketing plan that works for your business, your resources and your budget.