Quarterly Business Review Questions:
If you want to continue to grow your small business, one of the best things you can do is to review what happened during the last few months. It’s like I always say, “How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”
Reviewing your marketing plans from the past quarter is more than just writing out the number of followers you gained { or worse, lost! } every month.
It’s more about understanding why you’re spending your valuable time in your social sites or sending out those weekly emails. It’s about learning how posting in a Facebook group or doing a live Instagram story helped you grow your business.
Social Media and Marketing Review:
Let’s just get this out of the way – you know you want to write down all your social media site numbers so go ahead and get out a piece of paper or pull up a Google doc. Go through all your social sites and write out all your follower numbers.
These initial follower numbers are great to use as a baseline to remind yourself where you are right now. But don’t let this be the only thing that you monitor about whether your marketing plans are working or not.
Now that you’ve got the number thing out of your system, it’s time to dig a little deeper and review what really happened with your marketing plans.
Social Media Quarterly Review process
Before we jump into the Social Media Quarterly Review process, I want to share a few things for you to keep in mind while you’re answering these questions to review what happened in the past quarter:
1. You should always set goals! I’m not just talking about the number of people following you but goals that will actively help you grow your business. These are the numbers that you’ll be using to check your progress and to see what’s not working.
2. Make sure you create some kind of system to track your progress. It could be monitoring your Google Analytics { this is what I use every month } or tracking the internal analytics for each of your social sites.
3. Don’t make your tracking system complicated. I review my analytics and add in the numbers into a tracking worksheet I created. This way, I can compare all the numbers from every month to see what’s working and what needs tweaking. Your tracking system should be that easy.
4. Pay attention to what you’re monitoring { don’t just check the numbers and walk away } and adjust your goals to ensure that all the work you’re doing is helping you grow your business. Your business will shift and change as the year goes on so holding on to goals that no longer benefit your business will just weigh you down.
Let the goals that aren’t on track for you go folks … I’m giving you permission to just let it go.
Time to do a Deep Dive Marketing Quarterly Review
In this Deep Dive Marketing Quarterly Review, you’ll work through the review process and answer some questions about your social media and marketing plans.
To show you how to work through these questions, I’m going to share with you my answers about how I filled out the Quarterly Review questions:
What felt good with your social sites over these past 3 months? Which sites have connected you to more customers?
The two sites that clicked for me were Instagram and LinkedIn.
My favorite feel good social site was Instagram.
I started posting more frequently to both of my accounts, posting at least 3 – 4 times a week. I went into the site every day to Like other’s posts and comment on the content that they shared. I spent my time actually being social!
I’ve enjoyed my interactions more on Instagram than I do on Facebook. I let that enthusiasm encourage me to continue posting – knowing that the more often I showed up, the more my posts will be shown to new people who use the site.
My other favorite site for marketing my business is LinkedIn.
I’ve continued to connect and create more meaningful relationship in LinkedIn. And it wasn’t just because I showed up and posted consistently from my account. I took the extra step and connected with many of my connections with a follow up conversation in the DM.
I met new people and heard about all the cool things that they do to help their customers. I grew my community and hopefully over time, I’ll turn those connections into clients.
Right now, LinkedIn feels like everything that I wanted my Facebook business page to be. LinkedIn is all about business – what you’re selling, what you’re working on, what you do to help others.
No one cares what you ate for breakfast in LinkedIn and right now, this feels good about the place where I want to be to grow my business.
Which social space was time well spent and brought you the most web site traffic and/or sales?
Pinterest has always been my top referral site and the first three months of the year just reminded me of the power of this visual site.
To be honest, my traffic numbers went up and down and it was directly related to the amount of time that I spent on Pinterest pinning. And as the person who created the Pinterest Traffic Builder program, I have no excuse to NOT be on that site.
At this point, I’m taking a good look at my schedule and how much I can get done. With the increase in the Pinterest Build Up clients that I’m adding to my client work that I’m doing every week, this review helped me to see that it’s time for me to ensure my current routine includes the actions – like creating new pins and manually pinning – that I need to do to grow my business.
What was your biggest challenge with your social sites?
With all the changes going on with Facebook last year, I’m completely challenged with what to do with my Facebook business page.
Right now it feels like I use my business page as an online business card — when people first meet me, they look me up on Facebook so it’s hard for me to let the whole thing go.
I get it. The struggle is real with me too folks.
Without spending any money on Facebook ads, the chances that my business page posts are low to none of showing up in anyone’s newsfeed. And I consistently spent money on Facebook last year and got very little site traffic or saw an increase in my email list so at this time, paying for more ads doesn’t feel like an option.
I already felt challenged with my time and I decided to continue to stop posting on my Facebook business page.
How did you handle your challenges?
My biggest social media/marketing challenge was trying to create my content for Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
I’ve leaned heavily on schedulers – Tailwind for my Create Your Business Pinterest account and I’m using Hootsuite to post on my LinkedIn personal profile and my Create Your Business company page.
It wasn’t the posting of my marketing messages that challenged me BUT creating the copy and the images is where I kept getting stuck. I’d find myself wanting to post something and just pulling it together like 15 minutes before I hit the SHARE button.
I finally learned to deal with my challenges by changing my schedule to include a social media/marketing batching day into my week. And now once a week, my morning plan is to work on my marketing messages.
Blocking off at least 3 hours, I write my Instagram posts and pull together the copy for my LinkedIn messages. I create my images { sizing them for each site } and make new Pinterest pins.
Most weeks I can get it all done in that time block but during the other weeks when I’m crazy busy teaching workshops and working with clients, I learned to put my expectations in check.
I accepted the fact that if I had to the time to do the social media posts, then I would. And if I couldn’t get a chance to write anything or make any pins, I wasn’t going to stress over it.
What do you want to see happen with your marketing plans next quarter?
My Instagram account to continue to grow. I’ve seen other subscription boxes doing VERY well on Instagram so I know that it’s a good space to start reaching new members for the Create Your Business program.
Last year, I made some big changes to my marketing plans when I moved my focus from Facebook to LinkedIn. It’s been pretty awesome to see the work I’ve put into LinkedIn turn into engagement with my posts which are increasing my connections.
I’d love to make stronger connections like these with my Instagram account. Get to know other small business owners, get on Connection Calls with them and learn how I can help them grow their businesses.
Setting Social Media and Marketing Goals
Now that you’ve worked the questions like I did to see what happened with your marketing plans, it’s time to set some goals.
When you did your review, what seemed to be a consistent pattern? Did you struggle to find time to post or schedule to your sites?
Was your engagement down because you didn’t know what content to post?
Think about your biggest challenge with your marketing plans and we’ll use this information to help you create your goals for next quarter.
To keep your focus on creating achievable goals, I recommend that you answer these questions for just one of your social sites. You can repeat this process for each of your social sites that you’ll be using in your marketing plans.
What is your big goal for this social site?
Remember it’s not about the numbers! Most people think that the more people you have following your account, the more customers you’ll reach.
Make your big quarterly goal connected to something that will grow your business. Let’s say that your goal is to grow your email list because you’ve had good luck selling your products to your community who reads your weekly email messages.
How can you creatively share the link to get on your email list? Can you share a story or post a video to increase someone’s interest so they will gladly hand over their email address to you to learn more?
Spend some time brainstorming about how your social media posts support your goals to grow your business.
How will you get this done? List 5 action items to help you reach your big goal.
What specific action steps can you do to reach your goal?
Here’s some ideas to get you started:
- Create a weekly posting schedule to ensure that I’m giving my community good information to help them.
- Organize monthly events where they can meet with me off of Facebook for free coaching workshops.
- Start doing Facebook Live learning sessions to keep checking in with my community to connect with them personally.
- Post up a question or poll to see what my community needs to help them grow their business or blog.
- Create 3 new Pinterest pins that are linked to my email opt-in page.
How will you measure your progress?
What real numbers can you use to see if your marketing plans are working?
Going back to my example of growing my email list – I can monitor my Google Analytics to see how many people are clicking into the email opt-in page. I can review my email program to see how people are signing up for my list.
Think about what else you can do to up your game and share your email opt-in { or whatever your goal is! } and how you can track it’s progress.
Mark a date in your calendar when you’ll do a check-in to see what’s working and what needs tweaking.
If you’re ready to do your marketing stuff differently, then join us in The Marketing Strategy Collective!
If you’re tired aimlessly posting wherever and everywhere and getting nowhere. If you’re done with the weekly struggle of what to post or what site to use, it’s time to do something different to develop your custom marketing messages.
Subscribe to the Create Your Business program called The Marketing Strategy Collective and you’ll get access to exclusive tips, strategies and insights that will help you get better results with your content creation. Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or just getting started, the marketing content in the group is designed to provide you with actionable steps to develop a marketing plan that you’ll finally stick with and stay consistent with your posting schedule.
Join the Marketing Strategy Collective program and you’ll get access to a strategy group marketing program to help you improve your sales revenue in a collaborative group online experience.
The steps you’ll work through in our supportive group online space will be filled with action-packed content and the space to work through your ideas to help you learn how to show up in your online space. You’ll develop meaningful connections that lead to deeper relationships and create easy sales conversations.
The marketing tips and strategies will help you address common hurdles that small business owners face, such as writer’s block, time management and maintaining a consistent posting schedule. By incorporating these actionable steps into your routine, you’ll not only stay motivated but also enhance the quality and impact of your content.
