The closing of a year and start of a new one is often a time of reflection, goal setting, and new perspectives. While one may be reflecting on their personal growth over the last year, setting resolutions for a healthier diet and more exercise, or vowing to spend less time searching for and sharing memes, the new year is a chance to start fresh. It is a time to orient yourself toward new goals and commitments. The same holds true with marketing and advertising. It is a time to reflect on the campaigns that were completed throughout the year, evaluate their performance – who your message is resonating with and what tactics are driving the most awareness and sales. However, the end of the year is not the only time these types of conversations and evaluations should be taking place. We are huge proponents of digging deep into data and gathering insights and measurable outcomes of all marketing campaigns – whether that is in first quarter or fourth quarter – there are always lessons to be learned that will guide future marketing decisions and strategy.

With all marketing efforts, the goal should always be to optimize your strategy. This is impossible to do if you are not measuring results on an ongoing basis. In addition to campaign completion reporting, it is critical to constantly monitor and optimize your advertising. Regularly view your analytics to understand how people are reacting, measure the conversions that are happening during a campaign, optimize creative assets that are having stronger performance, monitor social posts and proactively respond and adjust as needed in real time – these are all examples of real-time data gathering and reporting that are invaluable to the success of any marketing campaign. Reviewing data such as website analytics, blog leads, email open rates, social media engagement, conversion metrics, and SEO performance on a regular and frequent basis will help align your decision making and strategy with your defined goals and KPIs.

So, if you find yourself still in the new year mode of creating those resolutions and are not already conducting regular reviews of your marketing activities, consider creating an action plan around the types of data you are able to collect and schedule regular check-ins to review this data, gather insights, and use these to shift your future strategies as needed.