February is almost over, and Q2 is right around the corner. Set yourself up for future success by performing a marketing checkup — a review of your company’s marketing strategies and how they contribute to business goals.

This isn’t just about your website or ad spend; it’s about evaluating all the levers that drive your brand’s marketing strategy forward. Let’s break it down.

1. Perform a website health check

A website health check involves evaluating your site’s performance and functionality. Are your pages loading quickly? How do they look on mobile? And is your site ranking in search engines so potential customers can easily find it?

To answer these questions, try the following:

Test load times

According to research from Databox, load times over three seconds can cause visitors to leave your site. Fortunately, there are many free tools out there you can use to test load times, including Google PageSpeed Insights. Make sure to test a variety of page types including your homepage, category pages, and blog posts.

Test mobile responsiveness

SOAX reports that the majority (63%) of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website’s content isn’t scaling correctly, your traffic will suffer and you’ll lose out on potential conversions.

To test mobile responsiveness, open your website in Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page, then click “Inspect.” From there, click “Toggle Device Toolbar” (second icon from left in the top menu). This will allow you to choose a mobile device from the list and view how your site looks on that screen size. Or, you can manually adjust the viewport size to test any set of dimensions you like.

Brand Motive Using Chrome’s “Inspect” tool to test mobile responsiveness.  

Audit website content

Regular content audits are an essential part of optimizing your website for SEO. It’s important to determine which pages are performing well and which ones need to be updated.

For ease, you can request a free website SEO audit from Brand Motives. Or if you know what you’re doing, use a tool like Google Analytics to track metrics like sessions, bounce rate, and conversions for specific pages on your website.

2. Evaluate your social media strategy

HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report revealed that 63% of marketers believe social media drives the highest ROI of all marketing channels. That means if your social content isn’t reaching its intended audience, you’re missing out on potential conversions. As a part of your marketing checkup, be sure to take the following actions.

Assess your primary and secondary social platforms

A primary social media platform is the main social media platform on which a company focuses its marketing efforts. A secondary social media platform is a supplementary platform used to further engage with potential customers or reach a slightly different demographic.

As a part of your marketing checkup, revisit your primary and secondary social platforms and analyze engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates. Also, note what type of content resonates most with your audience. Whether it’s videos, infographics, or blog posts, understanding what garners the most engagement allows you to focus on creating similar high-performing content moving forward.

Analyze paid ad performance

Dive into paid ad performance using Google Analytics, HubSpot, or the native analytics tools on the platforms where you’re running campaigns. Look beyond basic metrics like impressions and clicks and instead focus on click-through rates and cost per acquisition (CPA) to understand true performance. Prioritize running paid ads on social platforms with the lowest CPA and highest conversion rates.

3. Use marketing analytics to prioritize and optimize

Without data-driven decision-making, your marketing strategy is essentially “hope for the best.” However, simply collecting data is not enough — you need to know how it relates to your business goals.

Set relevant KPIs

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that measures a business’s progress towards its goals. Setting KPIs ensures you’re focused on the right metrics (typically, website conversions).

There are hard conversions and there are soft conversions. Hard conversions directly impact revenue, while soft conversions boost lead generation. Examples of hard conversions include purchases (sales) and free trial sign-ups, while things like newsletter subscriptions, social shares, content downloads, and page views are considered soft conversions.

Let’s say you’re debuting a new product. As a part of the launch campaign, you’ve posted on social media and sent out some emails. In this scenario, appropriate KPIs would be email click-through rates, landing page traffic, and sign-ups or purchases — all of these metrics can be considered website conversions, with purchases representing hard conversions.

Understand conversion pathways

Conversion pathways represent the customer journey; they detail the key steps customers take before purchasing or completing another desired action (such as subscribing to a newsletter or signing up for a free trial).

Brand Motive Organizing conversions by attribution channel in Google Analytics.  

By breaking down the “steps” users take before they convert, you can address bottlenecks and identify which channels have the biggest impact on revenue — more on this in the next step.

4. Revisit your marketing spend

Finally, the budget: your biggest opportunity to optimize ROI. For your marketing checkup to be effective, you need to take a long, hard look at your budget and determine where you should cut or redirect funds. Here’s what to do.

Cut low-performing channels

One of the easiest ways to boost your bottom line is to cut costs. In the last step, we talked about conversion pathways. Digging into these paths can help reveal which channels yield results and which ones don’t, but it’s not always straightforward since the average customer journey involves various sessions, channels, and devices.

Using a weighted attribution model (an approach that allocates a percentage of the budget to specific media or tactics) can help you navigate the ambiguity of campaign performance and make informed decisions about which low-performing channels to cut.

Keep in mind that you need to deploy a mix of top-, mid-, and low-funnel marketing tactics for campaigns to be effective. Doing so ensures you engage with your audience at every step of their journey, from building brand awareness to driving consideration and ultimately converting leads into customers.

Incorporating a full-funnel approach alongside a weighted attribution model will help you optimize budget allocation, refine your strategy, and achieve better overall campaign performance.

Invest further in high-performing tactics and channels

You probably saw this coming, but by cutting spend on low-performing channels you can redirect those funds to high-performing channels and tactics.

Perhaps your evaluation of paid ad performance uncovered that LinkedIn ads have the highest click-through rate of any platform while Instagram ads perform abysmally. Here, you could cut spending on Instagram altogether and use the leftover funds to double down on LinkedIn promotions. This is just one example of how data helps you pinpoint which marketing tactics are the most effective for your business. Using that knowledge to refine and reallocate resources to high-performing channels is key to achieving your business goals.

Position Your Brand for Success in 2025 and Beyond

Conducting a marketing checkup can make the difference between stagnation and growth for your business. If your audit uncovers areas that need improvement, Brand Motives can help.

Whether you’re seeking creative campaign ideas or a total brand overhaul, we’re here to craft a solution that fits your unique goals. Schedule a consultation to get started.

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