Mastery or mediocrity?

The five fundamentals to consider when reviewing your marketing for 2024

As you reflect on the wins (and perhaps losses) of 2023, and prepare to shape your plans for a stronger 2024, here are five fundamentals to reflect on:

1. Check for mission-drift

Dust off your organisation’s mission and vision statements and compare it to your key messaging and campaigns. 

Are they aligned? Has all of your marketing activity helped to build the brand and move the organisation closer to achieving its vision? 

If the answer is not a firm yes, stop everything to work out why – Does the team understand the mission and vision? Do the senior leaders need help articulating purpose? Has the purpose of the organisation shifted?

If your marketing is not helping achieve the vision it is a waste of time and money.

2. Reacquaint yourself with your audience 

As with any relationship, people and priorities can change and if we’re not paying attention we risk losing relevance and connection. We can slowly drift apart without even noticing.

Take an indepth look at the people who are buying your products or services and interacting with you online. 

How well do you know them? Does this audience match who you thought you were targeting? If you target a particular life stage, does the new cohort differ in behaviour, worldview, appearance or style from the previous group? Alternatively, if you’re targeting a generation, are you growing up with them? How have their needs changed as they age?

Do you need to adjust your marketing to better suit your audience? Or should you update the profile of the audiences you’re targeting?

3. Assess the market

We can get so deep in our daily work that we lose sight of the changes occurring around us. Changes in technology, cultural norms and beliefs, competition, customer behaviours and expectations. 

The goal here is to reaffirm your product market fit. Does the space in the market still look the same? Does your offering still fit? What major shifts are taking place? What trends should you be aware of over the coming months?

4. Sense check brand perception 

Your audiences’ perception of your brand directly influences how and where you fit in their lives and what they trust you to do. When your customers’ perception matches reality they are more likely to connect and purchase.

How do people feel about you? What do they think you do? Where do they see you fitting in the market? Does this match your brand strategy? Has the perception changed as culture shifts? 

Brand monitoring tools, such as Tracksuit, can be hugely helpful, but don’t underestimate the insights of your frontline staff, they often have a pretty good gauge on how customers think and feel about your brand. 

Remaining relevant is critical to continued success. Once momentum is lost it becomes increasingly difficult to re-energise it. So it is important to keep your finger on the pulse. 

Note: Accurately monitoring brand perception relies on a well defined brand strategy. If you don’t know who you want to be, how can you assess that the perception is correct?

5. Look at what’s working and what’s not 

The number one trap I see marketing teams fall into is attempting to do everything. Whether it be a fear of missing out, a lack of experience, limited data or a shaky strategy, an over-packed marketing plan just for the sake of it damages the customers’ experience.

Take a look at what gained the most attention? What did people engage with? What generated the most revenue? Don’t forget to report against the key objectives, if the objective was revenue but people only clicked on it, then it wasn’t effective.

Then lead into what worked and reduce or cut out the activity that didn’t work. 

Because we’re People-First marketers, it is mission critical that we shape our marketing activity around what is relevant and meaningful for our target audience. 

Remember, simple is not simple, and making your marketing feel effortless to your audience takes a huge amount of effort and an intentionally aligned strategy across all channels.

Pro Tip: Check your ego and emotion at the door before you start your review. We can only continue to improve when we look objectively at what has and hasn’t worked.