Twenty marketing questions for Q4 2015

Marketers, welcome to the last quarter of 2015. It’s time to look back at the data from your 2015 campaigns, and it’s also time to ask yourself what needs to change to improve marketing ROI for the rest of this year and as you transition into 2016.

To help you, we’re trying something a little different in today’s blog. We’ve drawn up a list of twenty essential questions to ask yourself and your team as you prepare to develop next year’s marketing strategy.

Data

• What metrics are we focusing on, and what do they tell us?
• Are we drawing actionable insights from the data we collect?
• Are those insights driving positive results?
• What data points or metrics are we lacking?

Content

• Does our content truly address our prospects’ needs?
• Do we have content for leads at every stage of the buying cycle?
• Is our content driving our leads down the marketing funnel?
• How can we improve the conversion rate of our content?

Marketing/sales alignment

• How often do the marketing and sales departments meet in person?
• Are marketing and sales creating reports that provide each other with actionable insights?
• How qualified are the leads that marketing is providing to sales?
• Do marketing and sales have the same definitions for common phrases, like MQL, SQL and warm/cold lead?

Marketing ROI

• Do we have the tools and data to prove marketing’s worth to the company?
• Are we able to quantifiably prove our impact on the health of the business?
• Could we improve our impact through better allocation of resources?
• Do we have a clear idea of our short-term and long-term goals and a plan for how to achieve them?

The marketing team

• Do we have the team structure we need for success?
• Could our staff benefit from ongoing training opportunities?
• Should we be working with a partner firm or firms?
• How can collaboration among our staff be improved?

Take some time to sit down and answer these questions by yourself or with your team. Then, browse our past blogs for more ideas on how to address these and other marketing questions. We have a great lineup of posts in the coming weeks that will help you take a critical look back at 2015 so far and forward to the coming year.

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