We’re officially half way through 2026! In this week’s episode, Vivian and I are breaking down the essentials of a mid-year marketing review, and sharing practical tips on how to get started on one for your small business.
Want to support this podcast? You can do so at buymeacoffee.com/sobmarketing OR by liking, subscribing, following, and leaving us a review!
Looking for a community of other S.O.B.s handling their marketing on their own? Join our S.O.B. Community! A membership includes:
- An extensive library of tutorials
- A community of like minded small owned businesses
- Free downloads and templates for you to jumpstart your marketing
- A weekly hour long Zoom call with marketing professionals to talk shop or answer any questions you may have when it comes to marketing your small business.
Join our 𝐒.𝐎.𝐁 (𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬) 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://www.skool.com/sob
____________________
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to SOB Marketing
01:27 Marketing HOT TAKE - If It Ain’t Broke - Maybe Fix It?
02:59 The Importance of Auditing Your Marketing Data
16:08 Analyzing Campaign Performance: What to Look For
30:24 Creating Action Plans for Improvement
____________________
𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓:
How To Build A Marketing Budget: https://youtu.be/yvmE4e4FyRw
How To Create A Marketing Plan: https://youtu.be/4aZtxHBBBxE
Podcast Sponsorship Inquiries: https://sobmarketing.com/contact
Support This Podcast: buymeacoffee.com/sobmarketing
𝐒.𝐎.𝐁 (𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬) 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://theseasonedmarketer.myflodesk.com/sob
S.O.B. Marketing Merch: https://theseasonedmarketer.com/swag-shop/
Episode Transcripts: https://sobmarketing.com/blog
Sign Up For Our Email Newsletter: https://theseasonedmarketer.myflodesk.com/nb0wpptjjt
____________________
If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be helpful! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://sobmarketing.com
This podcast is brought to you by THE SEASONED MARKETER. For more free marketing resources, follow us here:
**Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSeasonedMarketer
**Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theseasonedmarketer
**Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theseasonedmarketer
COLLABORATION REQUESTS TO: vivian@TheSeasonedMarketer.com
Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
vivian: Things to do.
Chelsea: Okay?
Vivian: Roller coaster.
Chelsea: Yes.
Vivian: Ice cream.
Chelsea: Yum.
Vivian: Mid year review for your business.
Chelsea: Ehhh.
I'm kidding. Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Vivian: That is the topic for today, small business owners. It's June, and what better time for you to sit down and take a look at where you are in your mid year marketing plan, where you're heading, and what opportunities you have to grow your business. Get, you know, cha ching, get those dollars. All right. So that's what today's topic is going to be. Chelsea.
Chelsea: Yes?
Vivian: I know you have a hot take, a zinger.
Chelsea: I do. I have a marketing hot take. Vivian, do you know the phrase, if it ain't broke, don't fix it?
Vivian: I sure do.
Chelsea: Great. I hate that.
Vivian: Why?
Chelsea: Here's my problem.
Sure, it's not broken, but could you do better? To grow, you need to experiment. You need to change things. We can't get stagnant and just keep doing something a specific way because that's the way we've always done it and it works fine.
Vivian: I feel like you're speaking my life right now. No, it's true. Sometimes being comfortable can be the thing that really hinders us from taking a look at what other opportunities are out there or improvements we can make simply because we're comfortable. We're used to it, right?
Chelsea: Exactly so today we're going to talk about how I want you guys to get uncomfortable. Okay. We're going to get uncomfy and we're going to look at our marketing and what we've done throughout the years so far, and we're going to say, how can we make it better?
Vivian: Yes, I like this. Now, we recommend that you guys do this every year. This is a good time to just sit down and reevaluate where you're at. It's also the perfect opportunity for you to change things up. If something is not working, why continue to do it, right?
Chelsea: Exactly, and we have a three-step plan, Vivian, for this conversation today. It's going to be audit. Analyze. Then action plan.
Vivian: All right, let's go ahead and get started with the first step, which was audit. What does that entail?
Chelsea: If you've been an SOB for a while, then you know we are all about data. Collect your data. So, what we're going to do is we're going to look at all of the data that we could possibly have for the past six months. Let's look at our marketing data. Let's look at website traffic, right? Or page views. Which page on your website had the most views? What's the bounce rate? Campaign performance. Any campaigns that you've done this past year.
Vivian: So like these ads, right?
Chelsea: Yeah. Google ads, digital ads, all of that stuff. We want to collect all the data we have.
Vivian: Now, is there any particular way in your past experience, do you do this kind of by platform? So like do you take maybe one day and you're like, okay, today we're going to just kind of look at the website. So let's go through, look at the data and analytics of the website, and then also see what opportunities we have within that.
Chelsea: That's what you should do. Have I done that? No, I kind of do everything.
Vivian: Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Chelsea: I know. I kind of do everything...the only word that comes to mind is scrambled.
Vivian: You do it all at once?
Chelsea: I do everything all at once. Which I still haven't figured out what movie that is. It's a movie that I talked about last episode that I couldn't remember the name of it. Everything all at once. That's not right.
Vivian: I don't even know.
Chelsea: It's like, "everything everywhere all at once". I don't know. I'm still on this thing and I still haven't figured it out. Someone please tell me what this movie is called.
Vivian: Put in the comments. What is this movie she's talking about that is so elusive?
Chelsea: So Vivian, campaign performance. What analytics should we be looking at when we're auditing our campaigns?
Vivian: Yep. So one of the big things is click-through rate. This is a generic marker that they usually have on there. What it's telling you is for any ad that you have out there, how many people are actually clicking on it and going to the intended page or to the intended...what do you call it? Landing page that you have attached to it. I think that's really interesting because a lot of people stop at just looking at the views, the visibility of the ad, but the purpose of the ad is to get them to take some type of action. What you want to do is to see what is the conversion rate of a person seeing the ad and actually taking the action that I'm intending for the ad. That can either be making a sale or simply, some people do stuff for lead generation that route them to the emails. To an email list. That would be considered a successful campaign, if you're actually getting people on the email list like you intended for that particular ad. So every ad's a little different. We do want you looking at the analytics. Ideally, you would do this as the ad is running so that you can make tweaks to the ad. Before it ends and ensuring that you're getting the most value out of the money that you're putting into that campaign.
But it's June. This is a good time if you're not kind of doing that throughout the year to go ahead and just look at the performance of all of the campaigns now.
Chelsea: Also, just in general, even if you are looking over your campaigns as they're running, I think you should look at all of them again mid-year. Because one, are you going to remember what happened with those campaigns? Are you going to be up to date? Two, the reason that we're auditing and we're looking at all of this data is because we're going to compare it to each other, you know? That's where the analyzing comes in. We want to see what's working really well, what's not. What changes we need to make.
Vivian: I'm glad you brought this up for one reason. There's this weird thing in marketing where we always, it's very black and white to us. Is the ad working? Is the ad successful? What we don't do enough of as small business owners is saying, okay, great, that's successful, but is something else working better? Like, am I being able to get more leads or am I making more sales on less money, by investing less. If the fact is that at this time, like Chelsea's saying, you go through, you analyze it and you're like, great, those Facebook ads worked really, really well. However, my Google ads are way more effective. I'm able to put half the amount of money into a Google ad and it's giving me more sales. Then you just take the money that you're spending on Facebook ads, you dump more into the Google ads and you make more sales. It's a great time to not just say what is working, what isn't working, but to say what is working better. Could I save money or could I make more sales by simply dumping more money into this other thing that's just more effective?
Chelsea: I love that. I also want to say something controversial, and I don't know if you're going to agree.
Vivian: Why do you always mess up our conversations with controversial things?
Chelsea: I know, okay. Views are important. You need to know how many people are seeing your ad. I get that. I just feel like views in general, across the board, are a vanity metric.
Yes, it's important to know how many people are seeing it, but really what you need to know is the click-through rate. Really what you need to know is the lead generation.
Vivian: Yes, you're correct.
Chelsea: I'm correct.
Vivian: I do agree with that. They call it a vanity metric for a reason. The more, I would say the better analytic to look at is the conversion rate.
When you're talking about percentages, you guys, if you have 10 views on something and the conversion rate on that is 1% as opposed to having 2 views on something and the conversion rate is 75%. It means that your ad or your campaign is actually really good at finding that ideal customer or target audience and the ad is being put in front of them. That's why you have that higher rate of conversion. Those are the things you want to look at. Like you're saying, you don't want it just to be one data point. You need to kind of look at the whole picture to see how well your campaigns are doing.
Chelsea: In terms of lead generation and conversions, really the important thing is what's driving your sales? Is this ad converting? Is this ad bringing in leads? That's what we want to look at when we're doing our first step and analyzing.
Vivian: That's right. Let's also though not forget we want to go back and check our goals. So what questions do you have, Chelsea, that you want us to be asking ourselves?
Chelsea: I wrote down some questions to ask yourself. Did I spend my allotted budget or did I go over or under? If you're new here, we have an episode about creating a marketing budget and following it. That's the important part that people like to forget. They create a marketing budget and then they're like, ooh, I was under budget. That's so good for me. No. No, you don't want to be under budget. You're not saving money. You're just taking away opportunities for your small business.
Vivian: Yeah. I will say that I do think it's just as important. Equally weighted value. You don't want to be blowing your money frivolously without actually having some kind of strategy in place. But as you were saying, you can also come in severely under budget in a bad way, in the way that you just haven't been attentive to your marketing all year. If that is something you're seeing. If you're like, man, I really just did not put any money towards you know, digital ads. I didn't put any money towards sponsorships in my community. I really didn't do anything to promote my business. It's okay. It's June. So you still have time. This is exactly and we don't want you guys to feel like when you're doing this evaluation, this audit, it's not to make you feel like you're...
Chelsea: You're not getting graded on this. You're not going to get a bad grade. You're not like me who goes to the dentist and goes, Did I get an A plus? Which they always say yes. So just saying, I have great teeth.
Vivian: That's typical nerd behavior right there. All right. So you're not getting graded on this. If anything, we just want you to flag it, to know what you're doing so that way you can correct it, rectify it, and actually have a new game plan moving forward.
Chelsea: Yeah, that's the important part. This is why I mentioned the if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Maybe you're doing fine, but maybe-
Vivian: Maybe you could be doing better.
Chelsea: Maybe you could be doing better. Let's fix the problems for the rest of the year. Okay. So another question to ask yourself. Did I run the campaigns that I wanted to so far?
Vivian: Yeah, we talk so much about how marketing should be exciting, you guys. It should also mean that you're experimenting. Okay. Because if you're not experimenting with stuff, why do you have a business if you're not going to go out and explore the frontier of entrepreneurship. We want you to have excitement for trying new things and also, not necessarily that you have to dump a bunch of money into it, but find the opportunities that you want to try that mesh well with your target audience. If it is, I know Chelsea is hating on the AI bots all the time, but we do have another episode where we're going to talk about some of the new opportunities within Google ads for this AI overview stuff that they're doing. If that's something you guys want to try, spend a little money in it, do it.
Chelsea: No, exactly. I won't hate you, I promise. It's fine. You can do whatever you want. Okay, my next question I want you guys to ask. Did I make the connections I wanted to make? Because let's not forget about networking. That is a huge part of marketing. It should not be in the back burner and you've had six months. So what networking did you did, did you do?
Vivian: What networking did you did?
Chelsea: Stop!
What networking did you do in those six months? Think about it.
Vivian: Yeah. It is easy in today's day and age to focus so much on the digital aspect of everything and also to be a little reclusive because we can do a lot of this promotion for our small businesses from behind a keyboard or behind a screen. But there is a human element to going out there and shaking hands, kissing babies, and spreading the news about your small business. Remember that trust is still a very huge factor in the way that people purchase. If you're able to solidify a relationship, work that over time, gain somebody's trust by going to these networking opportunities and meeting people and establishing those relationships over time, it can make a really big impact on your small business.
Chelsea: Yeah, and if you haven't done anything yet, you still have six months.
Vivian: There you go.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Vivian: This episode of the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is brought to you by the S.O.B. Community. If you are a small business owner that is neglecting your marketing and you feel like you've wasted time and money on marketing help that didn't deliver. Or if you're just craving support from people who actually get what it's like to run and promote a small business, then our membership community is for you. Visit skool.com/sob to sign up today to get instant access and weekly support. That's S-K-O-O-L dot com slash sob.
*End of S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: Okay, Vivian. So we pulled all the analytics. We've audited everything. Now we're going to actually analyze this data. We're going to look at everything altogether. We're going to look for overarching themes. We're going to say what worked, what didn't. I think you should start with just crossing stuff off your list. Maybe this marketing campaign took a lot of time, it was a lot of effort, it was a lot of money, and it didn't generate anything. Just mark that off your list.
Before you do that though, I do want to point out what you said earlier, Vivian, with digital ads. Did your digital campaign not work because your target audience wasn't interested? That's not the platform they're on, or stuff like that. Or did you need to fix the digital ad?
Vivian: Right.
Chelsea: This is why you should be looking at your campaigns while they're running and tweaking and all that stuff. It could be that the idea was great and it would have worked, but you weren't tweaking it. You just left it there. You just, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, I guess in this scenario it is broke because the campaign's not working.
Vivian: Well, don't forget that depending on where these digital ad campaigns are, there are AI now features built into these campaign builders that will tell you, they'll give you recommendations as you go. So don't overlook that. I know sometimes, if you're anything like me, sometimes you'll get a notification that'll pop up on something and you just kind of ignore it. When really that notification could be telling you, hey, Google recommends that you change the headline on this ad. Google recommends that you add more photos to this ad campaign. Go ahead and take full advantage of these platforms that are notifying you and giving you suggestions because it can actually improve the performance of the ad.
Chelsea: So just something to consider before you just mark off a campaign. Was it just that this campaign, you know, it's not worth the money? Or is it just that you need to tweak it? Also, going back to what Vivian said earlier, we want to look at all of the analytics that we collected and see, okay, this campaign worked well. What worked better? Right. We just want to review and think of the best ways to allocate our budget.
Vivian: All right. Now Chelsea, I'm going to give you something that's a little bit of a challenging question here.
Chelsea: Oh god.
Vivian: We are notoriously telling you guys time and time again social media is not free. Content creation is great. It's also not free because it's taking up your time and you could be utilizing that time in other areas of your small business. We don't want you to devalue your time. We want you to understand that even though you're not being charged for posting on Instagram or posting on Facebook, you do have an investment of sorts in it. So how would you, if I'm going through, we're telling people go through, audit, analyze, how would you analyze your metrics or your content creation on a Facebook, on a YouTube, on an Instagram? How do you go through and analyze that part of it if you're doing this mid-year review?
Chelsea: Okay. Great question. For one, I'm not going to focus on the vanity metrics. So your views, your likes, that stuff is not as important. Instagram has also recently come out and say the most important thing is going to be your shares. How people are sharing your content. I would look at shares. I would look at link in bio clicks. I would look at the content that is pulling people in. So if it's a video, I would look at your, what's the metric where, how how long people are watching your video. Are they watching it all the way through? How many seconds did they get through? I would look at stuff like that. I would also, like I said, look at link in bio clicks, who's following through, where where are you getting people onto your list, your email list, your mailing list, your text list, all that stuff. Where are you converting people? You want to pull people, I'm sorry. You want to pull people off of these platforms and bring them into your own ecosystem.
Vivian: Now remind us why that's important, why getting them into my email list as a small business owner is top priority from Instagram. They're already following me. I have 10 followers on Instagram. Why does it matter that I encourage people to join my email list?
Chelsea: You know what, I read an article the other day, Vivian, that people, some hackers and scammers are now using AI to break into people's social media platforms. Get access to their Instagram and stuff like that. What happens? You lose access to your Instagram. You lose access to your Facebook. It could be that Instagram shuts it down. It could be that a hacker took it over. It's not yours anymore. What happened? Do you just lose all 10, you said 10? You lost all 10 of those followers unless you got them onto an email list.
Vivian: Yeah, I really love this. The one thing I'll throw in there is perhaps the analyzing part of this, the metrics are super important. We want you to go in and actually look at the metrics that Chelsea talked about for Instagram, for YouTube, any of that, right? What is the completion rate for the video link that people are watching? Are they watching 75% of the videos I'm posting? Are they watching a hundred percent? What's my engagement like? Is it people asking questions? Is it people that are asking for my advice? Are they trying to get onto my email list or to download my free ebook? Whatever that is. The other part of it though is, I think this is a great time to analyze the non-metric side of it, which is what place, what role does social media take in my small business?
Chelsea: I love that.
Vivian: What am I using it for? Because we do say social media is such a powerful tool. It is an avenue for us to get in front of new eyeballs. It's an avenue for us to build trust. Those things are slightly different. You can do both goals within your content creation, but you are creating content a little differently depending on what you're using social media for. Maybe this is a good time to say, am I posting the type of content that is matching or helping me reach the goals I have for it? If not, then maybe do I need to create a different type of reels? Do I need to share different types of carousel posts? We do encourage you guys to try new things, maybe there's a chance that you're saying is there some idea that I have that I want to try, but I'm a little scared to do it because I don't know how people are going to respond to it?
Chelsea: I love that. Great conversation. I'm glad that you brought up goals for social media. Cause again, we're not just creating content to create content. We're trying to get people into our ecosystem. We're trying to build trust. We're trying to get people to discover us for the first time. Goals matter.
Vivian: Y'all, this can also go for your email list. If you're saying, I don't really spend money on my email list besides just having the platform, or maybe you use MailChimp and it's free because your email list hasn't grown to where they start charging you yet. Look at the type of emails you're sharing. What type of information are you sending or what type of sales and promotional emails are you doing? Do you want them to be more educational or do you want them to be more promotion based? Do you utilize graphics? I mean, this is just a good time to sit there and look at all of this. One of the things I will say with the analyzing part of the data. Emails, a lot of times if you look at the open rates, you can start to see patterns in what subject lines work best. We've noticed that using emojis sometimes in the subject lines really increases that open rate. So it's little things like that that you can do while you're analyzing and just kind of getting a pulse on where you're at here in June.
Chelsea: Going back to overarching themes. When you're analyzing your data, when you're looking at what's been going on these past six months, think about, what is my target audience really responding to? Is it the content I'm creating? Is it the promotions or the digital ads? For an example, when I send out emails, my emails that involve this specific theme get a lot of engagement. It's a great open rate. But when I send out emails about this theme, I don't really get people excited, right? So you want to see...
Vivian: A correlation?
Chelsea: A correlation, yeah. I keep on going back to the phrase overarching theme. You want to analyze the data and look at the connections.
Vivian: Right. See if you can find what those connecting dots are.
Chelsea: Exactly.
Vivian: Chelsea, I wonder if in our talk with auditing and analyzing, is this a great opportunity too for people to get feedback?
Chelsea: Yeah, feedback is important. It's something that I think small business owners should be collecting all the time. But halfway through the year, you know, mid year review, this is a great time to maybe send out a feedback email.
Vivian: Yeah. We actually had done this the last couple of years for our email list around this time, I would send something out. It was because our email list is comprised of small business owners, I would send it out and say, what are asking questions, what are some things that you're having difficulty with right now? What topics do you want us to cover? So it's a good time to just kind of see, are we addressing, are we speaking to the problems that small business owners actually have? Not just the topics that are trending right now, but is it information that the small business owners actually want? Like what's their problem? Is it budgeting? Is it actually placing ads? Is it ad creation? Those are all different topics that could be covered, but you could do the same thing for your small business, whether it's through some type of like Google form. Maybe if when you're auditing and you're looking through your website, you're like, man, I don't have a feedback form on my website for clients or for potential past customers or something. So maybe that's something you integrate into the website.
Chelsea: I love that. You should absolutely have that, by the way.
Vivian: Yeah. Well, and can I also- we recently did an episode on Google Reviews and how Google has updated how small businesses, well, not small businesses, everybody. How all businesses are allowed to collect reviews. It's changed. If you have not listened to that episode, please go and do that right after you finish listening to this one because I think it's going to be eye-opening that Google has made these changes as of April 2026.
Chelsea: April 2026.
Vivian: I'm going to throw in there one of the things that you want to be analyzing are your Google reviews. While you're at it, go ahead and take a look at your Google reviews. Pop in there and see, first of all, how many reviews do I have? Make note of that because we know Google is taking down reviews if you're not following quote unquote their rules. Go listen to that episode if you want to know the rules.
What you're looking, what I would do is I would recommend, go ahead and look at how many reviews you have now. Check it maybe like three weeks, four weeks from now. Has that number gone down? Has Google deleted any reviews? If so, look for the overarching theme. What are you doing that's getting those reviews pulled taken down?
Also might just be a good time, we're talking about auditing the analytics and analyzing all that information. What are your consistent, what's the feedback? Is it that your staff is doing great? Is it that your staff is not warm and welcoming? Is it that your phone systems suck? Is it that people try to book online and they just have a big problem doing it? Whatever it is, analyze that part of it too so that way you can find opportunities to either fix customer service issues or it may kind of give you an idea of something you could put on your website or a way that you can just help improve a process.
Chelsea: I love that. I'm so glad that you brought that up. Okay. Great part of analyzing.
Vivian: All right. So then I think we can talk about the last part of this, which is what?
Chelsea: It's the action plans. What are we actually going to do about all this? We've analyzed the data, we're like, mm, this is an overarching theme. Now let's actually fix the problem.
So this is when you're going to plan out what's going on for the rest of the year. If you watched our marketing plan episode, Vivian, it could be that you do this quarterly. I love that for you. You keep doing that, okay? But the point is we've collected all this data, we've analyzed it, we need to figure out how we're going to make changes for the rest of the year. I want to make this very clear. You need to make changes. You can't just look at it and say, this is good. It's fine. It doesn't need to be changed. No, you should change something. There's always room to grow.
Vivian: So you're saying don't let all of this just be data collection. You actually want some type of change.
Chelsea: Yes. We want to actually do something, and it could be that we don't change anything that we're doing, but we add to what we're doing. It could be that we decided that we want to experiment more in marketing. So you don't necessarily have to get rid of what you're doing, but there's always room to grow. Let's make some changes so that our marketing can, you know, we can really oomph up our marketing for the rest of the year.
Vivian: Yeah. I think the other thing too is this might be a good time to create templates for how you want to stay on top of your marketing in the future. So
You know, if you've gone through and you analyzed and audited your information, you're like, actually, I should probably look at this stuff more than just once every six months. I wonder if this would be a good time to actually sit down and say, what metrics do I want to stay on top of so that I can have a better pulse on my marketing so that way I can actually pivot and change quicker than than mid-year, right? Or the beginning of the year, the next time you do this. This is a good time to do that.
Chelsea: I love that. Also want to point out, and this is something that is in our marketing plan episode. Go listen to that episode. You need to have a mix of marketing strategies. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. So even if they're, let's say your digital ads are great, they're cheaper, and the conversion rate's incredible, that's great. It can't be the only thing that you're doing. There's also variable and fixed marketing strategies. You need to have both. Vivian, can you explain what those are again?
Vivian: I'm glad you're bringing this up because part of this assessment could also be figuring out if you have any fixed. Because if all of your marketing campaigns or marketing initiatives are variables, it means you're likely missing an opportunity for consistency and for growth. Briefly, variable obviously means the stuff that you do intermittently. Fixed is going to be the stuff that you do year round. So for example, fixed marketing initiatives are going to be your emails. I want to send out a monthly email throughout the year. That's going to allow me a chance to build trust with potential customers. It's going to allow me to spotlight my products and services. It's going to allow me to be able to pitch any new programs I have or to keep that open line of communication. Great. You can do that once a month. You could do that two times a month, you could do that once a week. You decide, but that's a fixed marketing initiative. Now the idea being you want to have maybe a couple of fixed ones so you're getting coverage and you're able to promote throughout the year consistently. Within there, you're going to add in variable ones. Meaning, all right, maybe because I see a dip in sales, June, July, and August. What I want to do is run ads the months prior to that. So April and May, ahead of June, where I start to dip in sales. I'm going to run for those two months, April and May, I'm going to run Facebook ads. I'm going to promote this particular service. That way, that's a variable. It's something I'm only doing two months out of the year. However, it's very strategic in the time that I'm choosing to do it and for the reason I'm choosing to do it, to kind of counter that, you know, dip in sales during the summer.
Chelsea: Event marketing. Let's say you do the same event every year. Is that fixed or variable?
Vivian: Same event every year. I would say that is variable because you're not doing it. It would be fixed if you did, let's say, here locally we have Dell Web. It's an active community for 55 plus. If I were to reach out to Dell Web, what are you laughing at?
Chelsea: I was going to make a really mean joke but I'm not going to do that.
Vivian: About me? No, I'm not 55. Get out of here.
Chelsea: Sorry.
Vivian: I mean, I do have 12 years before that. Anyways.
Chelsea: Sorry.
Vivian: Let's say I reach out to them and I say, hey, I know you guys have these like monthly opportunities. Can I go ahead and every month come out here and do a presentation on, let's say I'm a physical therapist. Do a presentation on physical therapy, a different topic. They say, absolutely great. You could do that for a hundred dollars total. Wonderful. Now on my calendar, I have May through not May. I have January through December every single beginning of the month. I'm out there. That's fixed because it's throughout the year. If I'm only doing it for June, July, or it's a one time event, a vendor market that I do once a year, that's variable. Because it's not over the entire length of the year.
Chelsea: Yes. So what matters is the consistency, the length, the consistency in the year. Great clarification.
I think we're ready for the TLDL.
Vivian: All right, let's hear it.
Chelsea: Okay, so too long didn't listen. If you skipped ahead to this chapter, I'm going to give you a brief summary about what we talked about today. However, you should listen to this full conversation when you get the chance. Today we did our mid-year marketing review. Well, we didn't do ours. We told you about the mid-year marketing review and what you should do.
We want you guys to look back at your marketing and audit, analyze, and create an action plan. Simply put, look at the campaigns and strategies that you've been doing, what's working, what's not, and make tweaks so that we can reach the finish of the year strong.
Vivian: As a friendly reminder, we want you to subscribe so that you get notified the next time an episode drops. But Chelsea, didn't we get a review recently?
Chelsea: We got another review. Thank you so much. Y'all, please leave us reviews. We're going to shout out this person. I'm going to read the review because it's important to me. It's close to my heart. I just found, this is "Rare Find" from smash garlic in my eyes, which okay.
Vivian: I like it.
Chelsea: I love that name for you. "I just found this podcast."
Vivian: First, give us the star rating.
Chelsea: It's five stars. Like you have to ask. Okay. Five stars. Rare find. "I just found this podcast. The very first episode had nonstop actionable information." Nice. Good for us. "This is good. I own Symmetry Exercise Clinic in Naples, Florida." Cool. That sounded sarcastic. It wasn't sarcastic. "And the seasonality for us is challenging. I've been open since 2013 and run every part of the business." Yeah. Small business owners.
Vivian: Every small business owner out there, right?
Chelsea: "The landscape's only getting denser. This podcast is a happy find for me. Thank you."
Thank you, Smash Garlic in My Eyes.
Symmetry Exercise Clinic. I looked at their website. Pretty cool. Interesting stuff. So if you're in Naples, go check them out. Naples, Florida.
Vivian: Yes. Thank you again for that review. We love hearing from you guys. That's the whole reason that we're doing this. We want to provide just a little bit of guidance or give you guys a place where you feel a little less alone whenever you're like, man, this is getting harder to do.
I love that they said, it's getting denser.
Chelsea: It's getting denser, and they do every aspect of, every part of the business.
Vivian: Yeah, and I can tell you, as a professional marketer, for as long as I've been doing this thing, it feels like it's a wild ride. Like I'm strapped into a roller coaster. You would think that after some time in marketing, you'd say, I've seen everything. No, no, no, no, no, no. Especially with this AI stuff, these opportunities, all that stuff.
Chelsea: Especially with this new level of meme marketing on social media.
Vivian: Yeah, for sure.
Chelsea: Have you seen the PineSol videos?
Vivian: Do I want to?
Chelsea: Y'all go look up PineSol. Go look at their reels and TikToks.
Vivian: You're giving me homework now for this week.
Chelsea: Okay, y'all go do that. Look at Brita as well. Okay, so Brita and PineSol, go look at their videos. Let's have a conversation about it in the chat and go be the best SOB you can be.