Double Down or Ditch It: The Power of a Quarterly Audit

[00:00:00] As you listen to this, we are in the first week of a new quarter. Are you ready to steer your marketing in a new, more profitable direction? Today, I am sharing my personal quarterly audit approach that helps me double down on what's working and ditch what isn't. So make sure you keep listening to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:00:32] SEO, SEM, PPC, Email Marketing. Whew! There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your Digital Marketing Coach.

[00:00:57] Coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast. This is Neal Schaffer and if you've been following me for a while, you know I'm a big believer in being intentional with how you spend your time and resources and your time and your time.

[00:01:27] In everything digital marketing. We're not here to do more stuff. There's lots of people out there that will tell you to do more stuff. We're here to do the right stuff that actually moves the needle. So today, I want to talk about an idea that's very simple yet extremely transformative. It's something that I've talked about in my books ever since Maximize Your Social. I talk about it in digital threads as well. I hint at it with the PDCA workflow or Plan Do Check Act.

[00:01:56] But I want to talk specifically today about the quarterly marketing audit. The idea is that every three months, you sit down, look at what's happened in your marketing over the past quarter and decide what to keep doing, what to stop and where you can boldly invest more. I've been doing this myself and the insights I've gained might inspire you to do the same. So let's start with the big question. Why a quarterly audit?

[00:02:22] Well, part of this goes back and I think you see my voice is getting better, but still not 100%. But part of this is my background in B2B sales where I, after a stint in finance for two years, I moved on to B2B sales. And we were judged by how we did the last quarter, right? Or I should say how we're doing this quarter. It was quarter to quarter. When the quarter was over, reset, you're onto a new quarter. So I really like the idea. I love the idea of a fresh start with a new quarter. Obviously, it was challenging because then you had to find more sales.

[00:02:52] What you did until a day earlier did not bring you any favors internally. So the past is past. The future is the future. Now we are at during, I mean, I'm recording this the day before the new quarter. You'll hopefully hear this the first day or the second day of the new quarter. So here we have this natural checkpoint for you to reflect on the past three months. And you could be doing this, put it in your Google calendar every three months. January 1st, April 1st, July 1st, October 1st.

[00:03:21] But, you know, whether it's checking your analytics or your sales data, it's about figuring out what worked and what didn't, right? And then making changes to those things. So when a campaign or a platform underperforms, you can cut your losses. If something overperforms, you double down. It is that simple, yet surprisingly, so few of us actually do this consistently. The notion of doing a quarterly gives you the ability to do it consistently

[00:03:50] without being too much of a burden. Monthly might be a burden to some of you. Although you're more than welcome to hit it out of the park and do it monthly if you have the time and energy to do so. But the fact of the matter is, we get stuck in our routines. So think of the start of every quarter as your permission slip to pivot, to try a new experiment, to do something different. Worst case scenario, it doesn't pan out. You'll change direction again in three months.

[00:04:17] But the potential upside of change can be huge. I also want to add that an inspiration for this episode and for doing this is in my digital first group coaching community, I decided after several months of beginning this or launching the community that I wanted to have a place where we could discuss, or I should say privately, myself and each member could discuss their quarterly goals. What happened last quarter? What are your plans for this quarter? Really revolving around everything I'm talking about here.

[00:04:47] So I thought it was a great time to share all of this with you. Obviously, if you want to have quarterly one-on-one calls with me to go over this and to get my blessing on your plans and help you with your analytics, you'll want to sign up for the digital first group coaching community at neilschafer.com slash membership. But I digress. So I want to walk you through how I've been applying this in my own business. Now your list will look different from mine, obviously. But it'll give you a sense of how easy this can be.

[00:05:18] I want to start with books. So we're not even at marketing, although this is marketing deciding on the four P's, the place of where I want to promote my books. So in the case of e-books, you have Amazon, which also has something called Kindle Unlimited. If I make my e-books exclusive to Amazon, I cannot even sell them directly. If I make them exclusive, then I can take advantage of potentially increased royalties on sales days.

[00:05:45] I can take advantage of Kindle Unlimited so people can download my e-book for free, right? And all these other advantages, but I cannot sell it anywhere else. So in self-publishing, this is called going wide, selling on Apple and Google and selling the libraries and selling in all these different international markets, right? Koba, for instance, in Canada. But after, you know, I came out with Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, September 17th, 2024.

[00:06:12] And then shortly thereafter, I came out on, I believe, October 1st, Digital Threads 2024. So I had six months, right? You know, you need sometimes in order to see some things through, you need a little bit of historical perspective. And I believe with the books, three months was just too short of a time. But as I go back now, when I launched, I got great sales outside of Amazon. But outside of the launch, other than when I did these amazing promos with a site called BookBub, I was lucky to be able to do promos with them.

[00:06:42] But outside of that, what I saw was that I just was not getting the sales compared to Amazon. But it requires a lot of work, especially when I want to do promotions. So I have decided and slowly I am going to be unplugging from all these other platforms where I sell wide. But I decided to stop selling wide, at least my e-book. So meaning on multiple digital bookstore platforms, really focus exclusively on the Amazon ecosystem for my e-books, specifically, obviously, Kindle Unlimited. This was a no-brainer.

[00:07:11] Once I saw, I was getting way better traction on Amazon compared to other platforms. And knowing I'm not in here to make a million dollars from book sales, I'm in here to make sure that my e-book, my thoughts get widely distributed to drive future demand for my group coaching community, for my speaking, for my fractional CMO consulting, et cetera. So a bigger bang, less work, more focus, more effective, no-brainer, right? Absolute no-brainer.

[00:07:37] Now with you, it might be, do I choose Amazon or a Shopify store from doing e-commerce? I have a specific client in mind who actually stopped doing their Shopify store and doubled on an Amazon when they looked at their profit after shipping and handling. So this could be applied depending on what sort of product or service you have. Let's say you have courses. You have courses on Udemy where there's a bigger market, cheaper price, or you sell them directly, or you work with a platform like Maven,

[00:08:05] or you work with another platform, right? You might want to be comparing that ROI of spending the time on all these platforms and maybe deciding, you know what? The 80-20 rule, right? So this is very specific to my situation with product and where I want to sell it. I don't know if you're all going to have the same situation, but I want you to think, if you have a similar situation, I want you to think deeply about it so that you can be more effective with your time with the 80-20 rule applied to where, how you sell your products. All right.

[00:08:35] I don't want to flog a dead horse there, as they say. So let me give you another example, LinkedIn. So recently, I have been experimenting, or I should say I started experimenting with text-only posts today, Monday, March 31st. If you go to my profile, you'll see the one that I published, and it's already showing promising engagement. It is giving LinkedIn users another type of content to consume with. And I did an audit, right? I went into LinkedIn search. I did a search for marketing.

[00:09:04] I looked at the posts, and I was looking for posts that get a lot of engagement. And this is really the best way to figure out what sort of content the algorithm is favoring. So I do newsletters. I want to keep doing that. You listened to my episode two weeks ago about that. I want to be consistent on that because I'm not consistent enough. I got my short form videos down. Those are pretty much the two main types. Sometimes I'll throw out a blog post, although we know that link-based content doesn't do well. But text-only posts do well for a lot of people.

[00:09:33] And I want to experiment with it. So with the help of ChatGPT, and this is a great use case scenario for AI to give you ideas, I'm going to try a few different formats, a few different topics, a few different styles of text-only content. And I'm going to see what happens over the next month, two months, three months. There might be one variation of it that I double down on. Or I might say, you know what? Videos are doing good now. Why am I wasting my time on text? I don't know. But you don't know until you experiment, right?

[00:09:59] This is this whole PDCA approach that I talk about in digital threads and maximize your social. Now, on the other hand, I realized that my posts on my LinkedIn company page were getting very, very few impressions. No surprises. So you know what? I'm just going to stop. And I know within Social B, which is the scheduler that I use for LinkedIn company pages and Facebook pages, I'm going to get to Facebook in a second. It's like, it's just checking one more box and I can publish my LinkedIn company page. But if I'm getting so few impressions, it just does not make sense.

[00:10:27] So I'm going to step back from that and just focus on my personal profile. Maybe if I have something promotional to throw out there once a month, I'll put it on my company page. But it's pretty much dead. It offers social proof, but it just serves no one if it gets very few. And I'm talking extremely few impressions every time I publish a post there. So we're done with that. All right. So one less thing to worry about this Q2 of 2025, right? I talked about Facebook. Now, after checking my traffic sources, this is in GA4.

[00:10:56] I was pleasantly surprised that I got this big bump from Facebook. I think for the first month in a while, I'm getting more traffic from there than I am from LinkedIn and Twitter, go figure. Not as much as Pinterest, which always rules my traffic, at least after Elon Musk about Twitter. But when I did a little bit of research in my Facebook insights on my content, I realized that the videos I was sharing three times a week were not doing so well, but my blog posts were doing really well.

[00:11:22] And when I share my blog posts these days, I am not using the link. I'm sharing it as an image. And I'm using infographic images that I've been creating from my blog posts or sometimes curating from other sites. And those seem to be doing fairly well. So you know what? I'm going to double down on these static visuals and I'm going to cut back on video content for Facebook. So maybe instead of three times a week video, I'll do two and then I'll do more blog posts, but I'll make sure when I publish blog posts that it includes some sort of eye candy, some

[00:11:52] sort of infographic or data that can really draw people in because that seems to be the unifying reason why I'm getting engagement on these posts. Once again, I had no idea that this was going to happen. I was sort of publishing to my LinkedIn company page and Facebook pages and afterthought. And here we are. All right. Number four, podcasting. Now this episode's a little bit different, but the LinkedIn newsletter episode that I published

[00:12:16] two episodes ago, this was part of me leaning more on ChatGPT to plan my podcast topics rather than just going by impulse. It helps me be more strategic and ensures I'm delivering what my audience really wants. So I'm leveraging that idea that my previous guest, James Herman talked about, which is leveraging ChatGPT or AI as a synthetic persona, as my ideal avatar and saying, hey, and I'll tell you exactly what I did.

[00:12:44] And this is this new AI community that I want to launch. So this is something that, you know, the type of thing that I talk about in that community if you're interested in just, you know, DM me or email me, neil at neilschafer.com if you want to get more info on that. But really it's saying, hey, ChatGPT, you know a lot about me. I've been using ChatGPT a while. I share a lot of my content with the transcripts, blog posts, you have it, ideas, strategies. So I basically say, hey, these are my most recent 50 podcast episodes.

[00:13:13] Took a little bit of time to cut and paste from my Buzzsprout or my podcast website. I forgot which one I did to cut and paste everything in there, but got it in there, right? These are my 50 recent posts. By the way, of these 50, these are the 10 that had the most downloads. Great, you know, data to feed it. And then by the way, these are the five podcasts and I'm forgetting. Oh yeah, it was SparkToro, right? SparkToro is a great tool. I've had Amanda Natavidad. We did a webinar together.

[00:13:40] I believe we did an episode together here, but it is a fantastic tool that basically, if you put in a website, it'll tell you what podcasts it believes people go into your website listen to. So this one came up with like five podcasts. Amy Porterfield is one of them, for example. I'm curious as to how many of you listen to her. You'll have to let me know. But it came out with four other podcasts that it believed my website viewers were listening to. So I said, hey, these are my competitors. Or I should say my audience probably listens to these podcasts.

[00:14:09] So looking at their title description, what sort of podcasts they do, looking at my latest 50 podcasts, and then looking at my podcast download data, please recommend some topics to cover. It recommended 10 topics. Boom. The LinkedIn newsletter was one of them. And I thought, yes, I really hadn't talked about that, right? And I know my LinkedIn stuff. I've written a book on LinkedIn, obviously, or three books. I know it does really well. So that to me was a natural. So today I went back in because every other episode, I do a solo episode.

[00:14:38] I asked for an updated version. I looked at the download data again. I replaced my newest two episodes. I deleted out the old two episodes and it came out with 12 episode ideas. And I said, you know what? I have this other idea for an episode and it was this idea. And I put it in there. I'm like, what do you think? And it said, it's really compelling. You haven't talked about it. It's actionable, insightful what your audience is looking for. Go for it. And here we are.

[00:15:04] So another use case scenario I've found for ChatGPT to help me with my podcast planning. Another one I'm looking at is guest podcast appearances. I'm a huge fan of Podmatch. Go to neilschafer.com slash P-O-D-M-A-T-C-H. It's a great community of podcasters. I have found guests there. In fact, everybody that contacts me from cold outreach, I send over there. And I have also been invited to be on some podcasts there as well. But I really want to do more guest podcast appearances.

[00:15:33] For those that remember, right? When I came out with the Age of Influence, I was on 100 different podcasts over the course of 90 days. And part of it, I think, is there wasn't as much cold outreach for podcasts as there is today. I mean, I haven't seen this much ever. I also think it was COVID. So there were a lot more podcasts that were a lot more active back in those days, right? This is, we're talking 2020.

[00:15:55] But recently, coming out with two new books, I want to be on more podcasts because I know how invaluable they are as a medium to reach new audiences, new trusted audiences, actually. So this quarter, I'm going to experiment with a cold outreach tool. Those of you that know me know that I'm not really a fan of cold email and I get way too much of it myself. But I'm going to see how I can use it in a compelling way to book more guest appearances on other podcasts. It is brand new territory for me to use something like this.

[00:16:23] And there will be manual control over who I reach out to and how I reach out to them. But I'll let you know how it goes in a future episode, right? This, I literally, it's not a cheap tool. It will replace another tool that I have. I'm going to stick with Podbatch in terms of recruiting people for my own podcast. But I'm really looking forward to using this tool and seeing what it comes up with. All right. And then short form video. So this was another podcast episode I thought about doing is my new workflow, which allows me to publish short form videos consistently three times a week.

[00:16:52] And now that I have a system and I've had to tweak the system in Q1, but I think Q2, I'm good to go. I'm looking to increase that frequency to four times on some networks. And at some point, instead of managing the frequency, I could manage the topics, like what topic does well on what social network. So I can be more selective about which topics go where and be even more effective with my publishing of short form videos and social media. Because as you know, not all content works for all social channels equally.

[00:17:22] So this is just a snapshot. There's other things that I plan to do differently as well. But I wanted to give you some specific concrete examples to help inspire you think of your own. So your list is going to be different, right? Maybe you're on YouTube. Maybe you rely heavily on Pinterest or you have an email newsletter that you want to tweak. But the principle is the same. Underperforming, stop or pivot. Overperforming, double down. Adjust. Simple, right? It really is.

[00:17:49] So how to run your own quarterly audit. Let me break down a quick process that you can adapt right now. Number one, gather your data. Now with social media, you basically go into your insights or I mean with X, I don't have the paid version. So I don't have access to my insights. But looking at your last, you know, ideally 90 days of posts or if not the last 30 days, you can look at impressions. They're public, right? Engagement, clicks, leads, conversions.

[00:18:18] Your Google Analytics is important as well. Look at all that from the past quarter. Look at how much time you're spending in engaging on each platform, in creating content for each platform. So look for a mismatch, right? Spending a lot of time not getting a lot of results or spending very little time getting a lot of results. So Pinterest is an example of a platform where I spend little time and get great results.

[00:18:41] I'm looking to do more and I am increasing the frequency at which I publish and doing some other things to sort of amp that up to see if I can get even more traffic and conversions from Pinterest as an example. But also, don't forget to analyze any new experiments you tried, any new campaigns, anything new you did in Q1. Did they meet your expectations? If not, pull the plug.

[00:19:02] I mean, you could try to massage it another quarter, but I just go back to my VP of sales and say, Neil, you got to delete if the deal did not close by the end of last quarter, delete it from your pipeline. You need to start anew. You need to find business elsewhere. And it's that sort of scrappy approach that I think will help you be really effective with your digital marketing using this type of audit. All right. Number two, categorize underperformers and overperformers, right? Underperforming channels, formats, campaigns. Consider scaling back or stopping them altogether.

[00:19:33] Overperforming areas, plan to invest more time, effort, or budget there. Pretty simple. Now, number three, this gets back to my PDCA background. Prioritize one or two new experiments. Told you about that guest podcasting outreach cold email tool, right? Each quarter tests something new. It could be a new custom GPT and chat GPT, right? But it could be a new platform, a new content style, or a new strategy for lead generation. For me, it was text-only LinkedIn posts and new short-form video workflows. What will it be for you?

[00:20:02] Number four, set goals and timelines. Document your pivot decisions. Decide how you'll measure success for the new quarter. Maybe you want to increase leads by 20% or raise your average post engagement by 50%. Whatever that is, document. Write down the actions that you're taking to do that and see how you do. And then number five, revisit and repeat. Mark your calendar to do this again in three months. Keep the cycle going. Stop, double down, try something new.

[00:20:30] I want to give you some extra pro tips here. Leverage AI. Tools like ChatGPT can help you parse through data or come up with fresh content ideas so you're not making these decisions in a vacuum. As I hinted at when I talked about my podcast planning, stay nimble. I think it's really important to be really nimble and agile. So instead of huge year-long campaigns, focus on quick wins and incremental improvements every quarter. That's always been my approach to all this. The right metrics.

[00:20:58] Be sure you're focusing on metrics that actually move the needle. Sales, conversions, qualified leads. Not just vanity metrics like follower count. Impressions is a little bit vanity, but at least you know how well you're doing in the algorithm. Which means it is scientific data that is top of the funnel that if you can get more impressions, then everything else should follow, right? Is one way that I look at it. And then document everything. Keep a simple spreadsheet or a project management board. It could be a Google Doc. It could be a Notion.

[00:21:27] It'll help you track the impact of decisions and make it easier to adjust next quarter. So that's the quick guide to a quarterly marketing audit. Honestly, this approach has saved me so much time, money, and stress because I'm always in tune with what's actually working. And that's what I want for you too. Remember, there's way more upside in trying something new than mindlessly repeating what isn't working. What was that Albert Einstein quote? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

[00:21:57] And I've mentioned that in this podcast before and I will mention it again because I truly believe it. So speaking of new, I'd love to hear what you decide to audit in your marketing. Shoot me a message on LinkedIn or share your quarterly goals in social media and tag me so we can celebrate those wins or learn from our pivots together. And before I go, here's one final tip. Please keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate your quarterly audit. A few bullet points on what to stop, what to continue, and what to start can truly transform your digital marketing.

[00:22:26] I am actually working on creating a one-page checklist. If I end up publishing this, I will make sure to run an ad, well, my own internal ad on my podcast that you know and you'll be able to download it. Or make sure you go to my newsletter, newsletter.neilschafer.com, subscribe, and you'll get free access to it there as well. Well, thanks for joining me on what I hope you found to be another exciting episode of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating,

[00:22:55] and share it with someone who might need a quarterly marketing reset. Until next time, keep experimenting, keep auditing, and keep growing. This is your Digital Marketing Coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com

[00:23:24] to tap in to the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on Your Digital Marketing Coach.