A Good Strategy For The Future Starts With Evaluating The Past

As sales and marketing professionals we are constantly looking forward and trying to increase the return on our efforts, the number of leads generated, and ultimately sales. Most web marketing strategies are highly focused on increasing these same factors. To make sure we're not making the same mistakes twice and that we're maintaining flexibility in our efforts, we have to take time to review where we've come from.

Internal Process Review

A few questions to get you started with this review process include:

1. Who's doing each of the following right now:
   • Facebook status updates/commenting/Liking/sharing/following up/advertising
   • Twitter tweets/retweets/favoriting/following/following up/promoting tweets
   • Instagram photo taking/photo posting/liking/commenting/following/following up
   • LinkedIN status updates/connecting/updating the company profile/joining groups/following up/advertising
   • Google+ status updates/+1ing/circling/following/sharing/following up
   • Email Marketing
   • SEO Efforts
   • Content creation for your blog, website, emails, follow-up pieces, etc...
   • Updating your website
   • Blogging
   • PPC management
   • Handling new leads and following up with them
   • Reporting on analytics to measure how you're doing
2. How is each person doing in their roles above and should changes be made?
3. Is more collaboration needed with other areas of the organization to make their efforts more effective? If so, with who?
4. Who is following up with leads and moving them through your funnel to a sale?
5. Could this process be more efficient?

Evaluation Of Goals Set and Goals Met

You did set goals in the past, right? If not, start now. Be it number of leads generated, average rank in search engines for non-branded keywords, number of shares in social media, or the number of email opt-ins you grew, it's must to set the bar somewhere. If you don't you will be stuck in the mud. You need to have a finish line of sorts to reach.

You need to ask questions such as:

1. How many leads were generated versus the goal. Why did you under perform/exceed the goal?
2. How did you perform in your social media metrics compared to your goals?
3. What type of social media posts got the most attention and why?
4. How did you perform in your email marketing efforts relative to your goals? (opt-in #s, click-to-site #s, conversions)
5. What type of content generated the most email opt-ins and why?
6. What blog posts were shared the most in social media or generated the most comments and why?

As you can see, these questions have the dual outcome of keeping you honest on the results of your efforts and forcing you to get to the bottom of why some things worked, and others didn't.

Review Of Current/Short Term Business Objectives

Your marketing efforts should obviously be focused around your business objectives. How do your current objectives and overall business goals drive your web marketing? Conversely, how do your web marketing efforts help you achieve your business objectives and goals? This needs to be an open discussion with your team, and probably a web marketing consultant.

Conclusion

Your answers to the questions above may reveal that you simply haven't focused on web marketing enough for it to be effective for your organization. You may have a team of 1 trying to do all of those things and getting very little progress made. That's common. The point of establishing a view of the past is to see where changes need to be made to improve the effectiveness of your ongoing web marketing strategy.