The Check-In Point: Review Your Goals With a Mid-Year Review

Now that we’re just over halfway through the year, it’s a great time to take stock via a mid-year business review. Your tech startup has no doubt made some fantastic achievements this year, but resting on those laurels is a sure way to achieve stagnation. Reviewing your goals and strategies helps you tweak or completely transform your methods to make even bigger gains in the latter half of the year. Let’s have a look at the basics of an effective business mid-year review.

Assess and Reassess Your Business Goals

All successful businesses have goals, whether these are granular KPIs measured at a team and employee level, an overall vision, or a combination of both. You know where you want your business to be, but have you articulated that to your teams and stakeholders? Neuroscientists know that writing out your goals in detail makes you far more likely to achieve them. In business terms, this means having a formal plan that shows what you want to achieve and how you will get there — and what you’ve achieved so far.

Now is the perfect time to return to that plan and figure out what’s worked, what’s in the process of working, and what hasn’t had an impact at all. The key to this is, of course, effective business data. Your mid-year review should include sales, investment opportunities and conversations, marketing impacts, the effectiveness of your online content, and feedback from stakeholders. This may include partners, clients, or even other businesses that have engaged with your offerings in either a positive or negative way. It’s important to have a “warts and all” approach and not to shy away from criticism and complaints. Understanding where you’ve gone wrong gives you the power to make things better.

Review Your Marketing Strategy

With that in mind, it’s definitely the best time to review and adapt your marketing strategy. It’s rare that the thrust of your marketing efforts will remain static throughout the year. Of course, if you have something that works, keep doing it! You might have a particularly effective social media presence, for example, where other businesses engage with you regularly via direct messaging or links out to your website. What you could do, though, is sift through your data to find any leads that didn’t convert. Were there too many failed follow-ups from your sales teams? Is your email marketing strategy too heavy-handed?

This is the ideal time to engage a marketing expert to fine-tune your efforts, making sure they’re in line with your company goals and vision and also that your visible marketing campaigns align with your company values. Fifty-seven percent of buyers are more loyal to companies committed to addressing social inequity — something to consider when considering branding and marketing.

If you don’t have a marketing executive in your C-Suite, or they need additional support, consider a fractional CMO who can come into your tech startup and give the organization the mid-year lift it needs to guarantee success for the rest of the year.

Plan Your Content Strategy

A huge part of your marketing efforts is the content you provide. B2B marketing means positioning yourself as an expert in your field, whether that’s as a provider of a real estate CRM or an app to help source fleet insurance. Whatever your tech offering, you need to be known as the company that “knows its stuff.” That means regular blogs or articles, eBooks, whitepapers, and video content. Video is the top way to engage people at the moment, with 88% of enterprise marketers expecting a significant uptick in the amount of video content they create in 2022. Buyers and stakeholders want product demonstrations, testimonials, or even live events that they can engage with and ask questions.

Take your mid-year review as the opportunity to plan out your content strategy for the rest of the year. You can align content seasonally, thinking about peak times of year for your industry. You can engage marketing experts to understand what types of content are most successful and even the best times to post on social media for the best engagement. There are so many small changes that can have a huge impact on your growth for the rest of the year.

Final Word

Have you had your mid-year business review yet? If not, consider getting additional support for your marketing and branding strategy to ensure the latter half of 2022 is about growth and success. Book a 15-minute introductory call with the team at Arch Collective, who can connect you to the right freelancer to help you reassess your goals and finish the year strong.

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