Taking Stock: What Can Your Marketing Teach You Before Next Year?

October might seem a little early to start thinking about next year’s marketing. But there’s actually a good reason to pause now, while this year is still fresh enough to remember what happened – and before we get too far into the ‘silly’ season.

You don’t need to carry out a formal marketing review or spend hours analysing every post, campaign and piece of content you’ve produced. A simple look back can tell you quite a lot about what worked, what didn’t, and what might be worth doing differently next year.

And importantly, this isn’t about beating yourself up over the things you didn’t get around to.

Start with what happened

Think back over the year so far. What marketing have you actually done?

You might have written blogs, sent newsletters, posted on social media, attended events, issued press releases, updated your website or tried something completely new.

Some of it may have worked brilliantly. Some may have made very little difference. And some things may simply have fallen by the wayside when other parts of running the business took priority.

That’s all really useful information.

Rather than asking yourself whether you’ve ‘done enough’, ask what your activity tells you about your business, your customers and the way you work best.

Look for useful clues

You don’t need complicated analytics to spot some helpful patterns. Which topics generated enquiries or conversations? Which social posts prompted a response? Did a particular service receive more attention? Were there questions customers kept asking that could have made useful content?

It’s also worth asking whether your marketing has been helping you work towards your wider business objectives. Maybe you wanted to generate more enquiries, raise awareness of a particular service, build relationships with existing customers or simply keep your business visible. And don’t overlook what felt realistic and worthwhile for you. If writing a monthly blog was manageable but posting on social media five times a week became yet another job on your to-do list, that’s useful information too.

Don’t ignore what didn’t happen

It’s tempting to focus only on the things you did, but the gaps can be revealing too.

Were there ideas you kept putting off? Did you start the year intending to do more email marketing, only to find that you didn’t have the time? Did your plans change because the business changed?

There’s no point criticising yourself for that. Instead, ask why it happened.

If something consistently gets pushed to the bottom of the list, perhaps it isn’t a priority. Or perhaps it’s important, but needs to be made easier, more manageable or better supported.

That’s a much more useful conclusion than simply deciding you need to ‘try harder’.

Keep, change or let go?

Once you’ve taken stock, try putting your marketing into three simple categories:

Keep: What’s working and worth continuing?

Change: What has potential but could work better with a different approach?

Let go: What takes time without giving you enough in return?

You might find that the list is surprisingly short. That’s OK. The aim isn’t to come up with a whole new marketing strategy. It’s to understand where your effort is best spent.

And there may be things you want to keep simply because you enjoy doing them or they help you stay visible, even if they aren’t generating an obvious enquiry every time. Not everything in marketing can be measured immediately.

Give yourself something useful to take forward

By the time you reach the end of this exercise, you should have a clearer idea of what you’d like more, less or differently of next year.

You don’t need to turn those thoughts into a detailed plan just yet.

For now, capture the things you’ve learned. What your customers responded to. What you enjoyed. What you struggled to keep up with. What genuinely contributed to the business.

Because that’s the useful thing about looking back: you’re not trying to rewrite the past. You’re gathering information that can help you make better decisions about the future.

Sometimes it helps to talk it through. If you’re finding it difficult to work out what’s worth keeping, changing or letting go, get in touch. We’re always happy to have a chat about your marketing and where you might want to take it next.

And next month, we’ll take that a step further, looking at how a little forward planning can make your marketing feel less reactive in the year ahead.