It feels like time is passing more strangely than ever during this pandemic. What day is it? Are we in August already? Before you know it, another year has gone by with your marketing plan on autopilot—are you sure you’re allocating resources towards the right priorities? In other words, you might be overdue for an annual marketing routine review.

Look at the Big Picture

Before even diving into what’s working and what isn’t, it’s important to take a giant step back and look at your company’s goals from a holistic perspective. What products or services have you been focusing on in the previous year? What products or services will you be focusing on in the year to come? From there, it’s crucial to identify your goals with those focus items. Are you seeking to reach new investors? Broaden awareness? Boost assets under management? At this stage, identifying the goal itself is the name of the game—no need to move onto the methods you’ll utilize to achieve your goals.

What’s Working? What Isn’t?

Once you’ve identified your goals for the coming year, it’s appropriate to take a hard look at your existing marketing materials and initiatives. Ask yourself: are we happy with how our current initiatives are performing? How do we feel about our existing marketing materials? Are they pulling their weight? Do we feel that they communicate the right information to the right target audience(s)? It may be important to also take into account how you’re measuring success. Is it the number of downloads of your whitepaper? The number of hits to your ETF homepage? Of course, fundamentally it may boil down to assets under management (AUM), but this is a poor criteria for evaluating marketing materials, because their efficaciousness cannot be easily tied directly to a boost or drop in AUM.

What tools do we need to accomplish our goals?

The tools you need to accomplish your marketing goals are dictated by your team’s vision of success, as well as the target audience. If “success” means a broader general brand awareness among retail investors, then perhaps a social media outreach campaign with short, snackable animated videos might be a good place to start. If “success” means communicating more effectively with sophisticated investors, then your tools may include lengthier content and research pieces, whitepapers, and presentation decks for webinars that dive into the minutiae of the financial products in question.

See our related article on 3 Ways ETF Issuers can Utilize Animated Videos

Ensure that your initiatives are working together

Your overall marketing plan is only effective if all the moving pieces are working together effectively. Your advertising campaign or content marketing should be targeting the right audiences for the content you’re driving visitors to. Your content should be tailored to the overall goals of your marketing campaign, which means choosing the right formats, lengths, and complexity. At a higher level, there should be a profound consistency in messaging and design across all of your content and initiatives, so that prospective investors know what to expect when it comes to your brand, products, and services.

The Bottom Line

By taking an annual look under the hood at your financial marketing routine, you’ll be aligning existing and new initiatives, while breaking out of the autopilot we often find ourselves in when we don’t take a step back to re-examine our overall strategy. With a closer look and the space to contemplate overall goals, an annual review is the perfect opportunity to get your financial marketing routine back on track for the future.