How To Run A Quarterly Marketing Review

Most marketing reviews are a scroll through a dashboard and a vague feeling about how things are going.

A useful one takes an hour, answers four questions, and ends with a decision about what changes.

Question one: what did we actually ship

Not what was planned. What went out the door.

Count the posts, the emails, the ads, the pages, the videos. Put the number next to what you said you would do.

This is the least interesting question and the most revealing. Most underperformance is not a strategy problem. It is a volume problem, and nobody wants to look at it directly.

If you planned twelve pieces a month and shipped five, you do not have a targeting problem to solve. You have an output problem, and everything downstream of it is noise.

Question two: where did the enquiries come from

Every enquiry in the quarter, sorted by where it came from.

Not sessions. Not reach. Enquiries, and then the ones that turned into money.

Do it by hand if you have to. On most small businesses the list is short enough to write out, and doing it manually shows you things a dashboard hides.

The usual finding is that one or two sources produce almost everything, and a lot of effort is going somewhere that produces nothing. That is the point of the exercise.

Question three: what changed

Compare the quarter to the one before it. Not to your expectations, to the actual previous quarter.

Enquiry volume. Enquiry quality. Close rate. Average value. Cost per enquiry if you are running ads.

One number moving on its own is noise. Two or three moving in the same direction is a trend. Do not redesign your strategy around a single bad month, and do not ignore three of them.

Also write down what changed outside the numbers. A price change, a new competitor, a season, a staff change. Half of what shows up in a report has an explanation that is not marketing.

Question four: what are we stopping

This is the question that makes it a review rather than a report.

Something in your marketing is not working and everybody knows it. It stays because stopping feels like admitting a mistake, and because the effort is already sunk.

Pick one thing and stop it. The time goes into whatever question two told you was working.

A review that adds three new activities and stops nothing is how marketing plans get too big to execute, which takes you straight back to the volume problem in question one.

The output

One page. What we shipped, where the enquiries came from, what moved, and the one thing we are stopping and the one thing we are doubling.

Anyone in the business should be able to read it in three minutes and know what happens next quarter.

Do it on a schedule

The quarterly part matters as much as the review part.

Monthly is too short. A single slow month sends you chasing changes that were never needed, and most marketing takes longer than thirty days to show anything.

Annually is too long. You spend nine months on something that stopped working in month three.

Quarterly is long enough for the numbers to mean something and short enough to correct. Put it in the calendar for the whole year now, because the review that gets scheduled when you remember is the one that never happens.