Most businesses look at their marketing in one of two ways: constantly, in a nervous glance at social media likes every morning, or never, until something goes badly wrong. Neither tells you much. What’s missing is a regular, structured look back that asks what’s actually working and what should change. A quarterly marketing review gives you exactly that.
A quarterly marketing review is the right rhythm for most small and medium businesses. It’s long enough to see real trends and short enough to change course before too much money is wasted. The end of September is an especially useful moment, with three quarters of data behind you and the final quarter, and next year’s planning, just ahead.
This guide sets out a quarterly marketing review you can run in half a day, with the right people and a bit of preparation.
Prepare before the meeting
A quarterly marketing review is only as good as the information in the room. A week or so beforehand, gather:
- The goals and plan you set for the quarter, and for the year.
- Spend by channel: agency fees, ad spend, print, software, events.
- Website data: visitors, where they came from, top pages and enquiries or sales.
- Search data from Google Search Console: which searches bring people in and how that has changed.
- Results from each channel: ads, email, social, events, print campaigns.
- Sales data: number and value of new customers, and where they came from if you record it.
- Google Business Profile insights and recent reviews.
- Any customer feedback, complaints or common questions from the sales or service team.
Put the key numbers on a single page, alongside the same numbers for the previous quarter and, if you have it, the same quarter last year. Seasonal businesses in particular need the year-on-year comparison, otherwise a normal summer dip looks like a crisis.
Step one: check against the goals
Start with the big picture. Did you hit the goals you set? If the aim was forty enquiries a month and you averaged thirty, that’s the headline. Don’t get lost in channel detail until you’ve agreed whether the overall picture is good, bad or mixed.
If you didn’t set goals at the start of the quarter, that’s the first thing to fix. Use this review to set some.
Step two: review each channel honestly
Go through each channel in turn. For each one, ask four questions:
- What did we spend, in money and time?
- What did it produce: enquiries, sales, sign-ups or other useful results?
- Is the trend going up, down or flat?
- Is it doing the job we gave it?
Judge each channel on its own purpose. Paid ads should be judged on the enquiries or sales they produce. SEO and content take longer to show results, so look at the direction of travel in search traffic and rankings as well as enquiries. Social media might be doing a brand and trust job, so look at whether it’s reaching the right people, not just at likes.
Be wary of vanity numbers. Impressions, followers and open rates can go up while enquiries go down. The closer a measure is to money, the more weight it deserves.
The most useful question in any quarterly marketing review is “if we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would we lose?” If the honest answer is “not much”, that’s your answer.
Step three: follow the customer journey
Channels bring people in, but they don’t close the sale on their own. Look at the stages after the first contact:
- How many website visitors became enquiries? Has that rate changed?
- How quickly were enquiries answered?
- How many enquiries became quotes, and how many quotes became customers?
- Where did people drop out?
Sometimes the problem isn’t marketing at all. A campaign that produced plenty of enquiries followed by very few sales might point to slow follow-up, pricing, or leads that weren’t a good fit. Each of those needs a different fix.
Step four: check the foundations
Take a quick look at the things everything else depends on:
- Website: is it fast, working on mobile, secure and up to date? Do forms still deliver? Are there broken links or out-of-date pages?
- Google Business Profile: are details accurate, are reviews coming in and are they being answered?
- Brand consistency: is everything going out looking and sounding like the same business?
- Tracking: is analytics still recording properly? Tracking has a habit of breaking quietly after website changes.
Step five: listen to customers and the team
Numbers tell you what happened. People tell you why. Spend some of the review on qualitative feedback. What are customers asking about? Why did recent clients choose you? Why did lost prospects go elsewhere? Staff who answer the phone or deal with customers often have the most useful insight in the business, and they’re rarely asked.
Look briefly at competitors too. Has anyone launched something new, changed their pricing or become noticeably more visible?
Step six: make decisions, not just observations
A quarterly marketing review that ends with “interesting” achieves nothing. Finish with a short list of decisions, sorted into four groups:
- Stop: activities that aren’t earning their keep.
- Start: new things worth testing next quarter.
- Continue: what’s working, perhaps with more budget.
- Fix: problems uncovered in the foundations or customer journey.
Give each decision an owner and a deadline. Update the plan and budget for the next quarter accordingly.
Step seven: look ahead
End by looking at the next quarter’s calendar. What’s coming up: seasonal peaks, events, launches, price changes, holidays? Is the marketing lined up in time, working back from those dates? If this is your autumn review, it’s also the natural moment to start shaping next year’s goals and budget, while the year’s lessons are fresh.
Quarterly marketing review checklist
- Goals and plans for the quarter and year are to hand.
- Spend is recorded by channel, including time.
- Website, search, channel and sales data are gathered.
- Key numbers are on one page, compared with last quarter and last year.
- Overall performance is checked against goals first.
- Each channel is judged against its own purpose.
- Vanity measures are given less weight than enquiries and sales.
- The journey from visitor to customer is reviewed for drop-off points.
- Website, profile, brand consistency and tracking are checked.
- Customer and staff feedback is included.
- Competitor activity is noted.
- Decisions are listed as stop, start, continue and fix, each with an owner.
- The plan and budget for next quarter are updated.
- The next review date is booked.
Want a second pair of eyes?
It’s hard to review your own marketing objectively. If you’d like an outside view, our marketing strategy team can run the review with you and help shape the next quarter’s plan. If pulling the numbers together is the painful part, our custom dashboards and reporting service can bring your data into one place so the review takes minutes to prepare, not days.
