Happy Mid-Year! For many DMOs, November and December fall squarely in the middle of their fiscal year. If the same is true for your DMO, now is a good time to pull out your Marketing Action Plan (MAP) and assess the progress of your goals and objectives. If you haven’t completed a Marketing Action Plan, you can download the following free resources to help you get started.

Marketing Action Plan Worksheet / Marketing Action Plan Cheat Sheet  / Marketing Action Plan Workbook

For those of you who have been referring back to your MAP throughout the year, it’s time to sit down and assess the performance of your marketing efforts to determine if your strategy should be adjusted for the second half of the fiscal year.

Budget

Review your budget, and track your spending. Ideally, you will have adhered to the marketing budget you established at the beginning of your fiscal year. Even so, this mid-year review is a good opportunity to ask these questions:

• Are we spending conservatively, or can we afford to increase our budget?
• Does the ROI we’ve generated thus far justify our spending?
• How can our budget be further maximized?

This is a good time to decide how you can shift your dollars around for the 2nd half of your fiscal year to maximize your budget and focus more on what’s working. Do you need to boost your digital ad spend or tighten the purse strings? How are your target market responding to your creativity? Is the creative message representative of what your market as to offer? It can be stressful to determine the best way to allocate your marketing dollars, but being a good steward of your money will help you achieve the goals outlined in your MAP and cast you in a favorable light with your stakeholders.

Media

When you and your team first started developing your Marketing Action Plan, you likely had a rough idea about what media to place based on the content consumption habits of your target audiences. Now that you are mid-way through your fiscal year, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate the effectiveness of your media buys. Do your target audiences respond better to traditional placements, digital ones or strategic combinations of both mediums. Has the media you placed resulted in more traffic to your website? Based on what’s working for your market, decide if your media budget and marketing strategy need to be reconfigured to accommodate what’s working and what isn’t.

Social

With one in five travelers turning to social media for travel inspiration, maintaining an active presence on the major social platforms should be a central pillar of your marketing strategy. In reviewing your social media efforts, take a hard look at levels of engagement. Do you find that your followers respond better to imagery or to written content? How are your ads and boosted posts performing? Is your content strategy appropriate for the platforms that you’re using? If you find that your overall social media strategy is not producing the desired results, review our best practices for your social media marketing plan, and download our free social media worksheet to assess the strength of your social efforts and begin paving a path forward. As you assess the success rate to date of your social media strategy, it will become apparent which platforms are best suited for promoting your destination and give you a better idea of the engagement and interest levels of your target audiences.

Equipped with this information, tweak your budget and social strategy to increase your ROI. Sitting down with your team and revisiting your Marketing Action Plan to determine what’s working and what isn’t should not just be an annual occurrence. So what better time to do so than during your mid-year review? Taking a critical, in-depth look at how your overall marketing strategy is performing and making mid-year adjustments can help you obtain your goals. Is your year-over-year progress not what you hoped for, but you’re unsure what to tackle first? Give us a call! We’d be happy to chat about how Stamp can help get your DMO back on track.