168. Mid-Year Reset Part 1: The Simple Marketing Review Every Woman Entrepreneur Needs

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg-Lueck, and this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Thank you so much for being here. I've been thinking a lot in my own business as well as with my clients that here we are at the— approaching the middle of the year, right? So this is a really great opportunity to look at where we are, take some time and pause, reconnect with what we decided back in January that we wanted to create this year, and then make the necessary adjustments. And the lens I'm always looking through, or what I teach on, is marketing, right? So I want to talk today about how to evaluate and look at what's going on with your marketing, how to know if it's actually working, what's working, and have some real clarity for you on how you want to adjust and improve and launch into the second half of the year. Because we are hitting the midpoint of the year and heading in the second half of the year. And so this is all content that I have taught and teach in my 90-Day Marketing Accelerator. And so I'm bringing that here to you and my students there I know have found it to be super valuable and hopefully it's helpful to you too. So I'm going to go through some teaching here. My name is Melissa My Marketing Coach and I'm the founder and CEO of the Avanti Business Academy for Women. I teach women how to really grasp the full measure of their business value and then communicate that out to the world through simple marketing and communication that really allows you as the entrepreneur to serve in your strength and show up the way that really energizes you and connects you to your best fit clients and brings in the clients and the revenue that you are seeking for your business. The real reason that I love doing this mid-year reset is because what I often see is that we're doing all the things, we're showing up, we're networking, we're sending emails, and oftentimes we're not pausing and saying, is this working and how well is it working? And we're not— we don't have confidence in knowing exactly the effectiveness of the marketing and the activities and all the things that we're putting out there. And oftentimes the mindset that we default to is nothing's working or it's not working or, and what I want to offer is that you are not the problem. You're not broken. The problem isn't your marketing. It's really having the system for evaluating it and improving it consistently because yes, money is one measurement of quote-unquote success in our business, right? We're in business to make money. So that's one measurement, but there are 100 different things you do before that first dollar that actually contribute to creating the money. And all of those pieces are what can be measured ahead of time as leading indicators so that you have some really good understanding and confidence that the money will be coming in. So really what we're going to talk about today is creating that feedback loop, right? What you're missing is understanding what activities are actually moving the needle for you in your business. So what I want to really speak to is the CEO part of you that we always want to be looking at our marketing through that CEO lens. Right? So your numbers, your activity, the inner wisdom, all the data points that you have. And when you look at all of those together, you'll see patterns emerge, right? And so in order to have patterns and to be able to see patterns, we actually have to start tracking things. And so we're not guessing on what's working and what's not working. We can see exactly what's working and then start moving in the direction of what's working and improving the things that aren't. Right? What I have seen over in my own journey and with many of my clients in the last 20 years is that we often get stuck or confused or demoralized, right? Because all we're looking at is the revenue that may or may not be coming in. But when we're looking at all the indicators of revenue ahead of time, we learn how to read that whole picture and we get rid of that all-or-nothing thinking, like it's all working or it's all a disaster, and get to see that there are always things working and there are always things not working. And that as the CEO, we need to have our finger on the pulse of what's working and what's not working so that we can improve it. So by the end of today, what you will know is where exactly is your marketing working Where is it stalled? And what is that telling you about the adjustments you need to make to improve the second half of 2026? Right? Because whether you're crushing all your goals or you're not, there's always places to improve. There's always lessons to learn, always stories that our business is telling. The best way to do this is my evaluation process. And I do this with my clients all the time. Anything you want to get better at, anything that you want to improve in your business and in our lives too, but we're going to talk about it with our marketing today. We always are measuring it and evaluating it in order to improve it, right? Evaluation is not just for sake of evaluation. It's for evaluating to get clarity on what— on how to improve it, right? Anything we want to get better at, we can use this process. It's comprised of 3 questions. The first question is, what is working and where are you seeing your growth? Right? And we always do the 3 questions in this order because it opens our mind up to learning. Right? So I always ask first, what's working? Where am I seeing growth? The second question is, what's not working and where are there opportunities for growth? What are things that I want to see growing? And then number 3, what are you learning and what do you want to do differently going forward? When you take time with these 3 questions, you get so much clarity. If you're looking at a specific piece of your business, so how do we do this? How do we use this process in particular around our marketing? So the first way, for example, what's working and where are you seeing growth? I want you to ask, what do you think and feel is working in your business, or what is working in your marketing? What is your sense of what's working in your marketing? And then number 2, what does the data say is working in your marketing? So what are the data points that we want to look at? And so I'm going to talk about that next, but I want you to approach answering those 3 questions in those 2 ways, right? First, What am I thinking or feeling, or what's my sense is not working? And what does the data say is not working, right? So always be having those two points because they're both very important because we always want to be listening to our sense, our internal wisdom, right? And then also looking at the data. And that's where real intelligence, real wisdom comes up for us as CEOs. The way I teach marketing is that in order to bring in as much business as you want and fill all the capacity that you have in your business, you simply need to be doing 3 things and 3 things only. And where we get off track is we get distracted by all the other hundreds of things and shiny objects and whatever Instagram is telling us we need to be doing, right? But really, what I know for sure, having been in business for 21 years and worked with small businesses and helped them with their marketing for 21 years, If you're doing these 3 things, you can bring in as much clients and business as you want. So number 1 is consistently bringing new people into your world. So you're meeting new-to-you people. You can do that online. You can do that in person or both. I always recommend both. And then when you have those new people in your world, then number 2, you gotta be nurturing relationships. Letting them know what you do and growing the relationship with them so they understand what you do and how you help. And then number 3 is making offers and invitations for them to go to the next step in the relationship with you, right? So if you're doing those 3 things, that is what I consider a complete marketing plan. And simple. We always want to keep it simple, and I'm going to show you why here in just a moment. So that's the architecture of a marketing plan. And to have a complete picture of knowing what's working, what's not working in your marketing, you're going to evaluate each of those 3 areas, right? So for example, you're going to say, what is working with me bringing in new people into my world? How am I bringing new people in? What are the things I'm doing and what's working and what's not? So you could go back and look at all the people that you have met and brought into your world in the first 6 months of the year and look at where you met each one of those people. You can tabulate that. You have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all this. I know exactly where I met every single person that's in my orbit. So that I can know I have my finger on the pulse of what are all the things that are working for me now and meeting new people, right? And then what's not working. For example, if you have a goal of meeting 50 or 40 new people a month or something of that sort, right? And you've only met 10. Over the course of 6 months, maybe you say, okay, my goal was to add 600 people— or that's a lot— 300 people. My math isn't mathing. Say my goal was to meet 300 new people in the first half of the year, but I've only met 150. That's not working, right? So we want to say, what about that isn't working? And again, going back to what's my sense of what's not working, and then what does the data say? And then nurturing the relationships, right? So what's working for you in nurturing relationships? What's working to move people through your client journey towards either working with you or referring you to other people? And what are the things that are not working, right? And then regarding making offers and invitations, what's working there? What I often see is people are doing a lot of meeting new people and a lot of nurturing, but they're not making offers consistently all the time. And offers and invitations isn't just telling people to buy your stuff. It is inviting them to the next step in the relationship and getting to know you, like you, trust you. Right? And so I have whole trainings on that whole process, but I'm not going to go through all of that here. So you're going to evaluate each of the 3 parts of your 3-step marketing plan using the 3 questions. So what's working, what's not working, and what am I learning and I'm gonna do different? And if you really give yourself a little bit of time and effort in doing this, you'll get so much clarity from that, right? Because what I often see is that entrepreneurs think— and I've seen this with my clients in the 90-Day Marketing Accelerator so many times— we have goals for them on their marketing activities, and they get to the end of the month and they do their tracking and they think they posted 30 times and that was their goal, and then they only posted 10. So oftentimes what we think is not actually what the data bears out. So we end up thinking we're doing all of these activities when we're not actually doing them. We're not staying consistent with them, and we're maybe not even making offers and invitations. And it's not for a purpose of judgment or shame. This is all data. That helps us as CEOs to be able to look objectively at what's happening in our business, what our business is telling us, the story it's telling us, so that we can improve, right? That's how we're going to evaluate our marketing plan. And then just have a gut check also, I would highly recommend, on— of the 3 steps of the marketing plan measuring your consistency as well. Which of the 3 areas are you doing consistently? Because we know that consistent action creates consistent income. So we have to have that consistency if we want consistent revenue coming in. Which of these 3 areas might you be avoiding is another good question to ask. I'm avoiding making offers because I don't want to seem salesy and I don't want to bother people and I don't want to be selling all the time or pushy or anything like that. So you might be avoiding that, right? Or you can ask yourself, what am I doing but I'm not tracking? Networking has always been one of my top ways of bringing new people into my world, but it was so second nature to me that I would forget to track it. And I would be going to all these events and things and I wouldn't even be tracking it and I would totally forget. And I think Oh, I haven't done anything to be bringing in new people, but actually I had. I just didn't even think it just was second nature. So think about tracking what you're doing because it gives you those leading performance indicators that you know are actually going to create revenue down the line. So you can be watching all of those pieces because we know when you measure, what matters, that's when you can actually see improvement in your business. So if you're not measuring, you're not improving. That is what I'm going to be teaching next week, a process for tracking and showing you what I track, how I track it. But for now, what I want to say about that is for each one of the 3 steps in the 3-step marketing plan, You want to have a goal for each of those actions. So this is why we want to keep our marketing simple, because then you're not setting goals and tracking a dozen different things. You're tracking 1, 2, or 3 things that you're doing. For example, if networking is one of your primary ways of bringing in new people, like I said, it is for me, then I want to have a goal for how many networking events that I am attending and how many people I'm meeting. At those events. And then, and then say, for example, I do email as one of my nurture activities. I send email marketing, right? So I want to have a goal for how many nurture emails I'm doing in a month or a week. And then I want to also have a goal for how many consultation calls that I'm creating, because those are all things that I know lead to clients, right? So then throughout the month, you track what you actually did against what you planned, and then you can see how it all leads to clients. And then to take it even a step further, then once you have the clients, you can reverse engineer those numbers if you're tracking, right? So if you say, oh, I want to create 10 clients in a month, then you know, oh, I gotta have this many consultation calls, I gotta meet this many people, I've got to go to this many events in order to meet that many people. And so you basically reverse engineer your success, and that's what makes your achieving your goals inevitable. And so when I have taught that in the 90-Day Marketing Accelerator, it's been fascinating because we track all of this all along the way. And then we'll get to the end of the month and do our evaluation. And this has happened in my own business over and over. We'll see if you did 48% of your planned marketing activities, by golly, your revenue lands about 50% of your goal. And you're like, oh, that makes total sense why my revenue is half of my goal. And so it's mystery solved. It's not a personal failing. It's just we didn't meet our numbers, right? And so that is the feedback loop doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's helping you see which activities are working, what's not working, and what you're not what you're needing to improve on consistently doing. And so that's the first part of knowing what's working and, and how to fix it. And then the second part is, which I get asked often, right? The question about activity versus effectiveness. So yes, I can do all these marketing activities and it's not just about doing the thing and checking the box. With marketing is all about creating connection and it's about serving your future clients, right? It's not just about checking the box and doing the thing. It's about the quality and the value of each one of those activities that you're doing. And that's a topic for another day, and I teach on that a lot too. But first, our goal here is to understand what is working, what is not, and how we need to improve. And once we're consistently marketing and doing our marketing activities and consistently evaluating and getting an understanding and getting some data under our belt, then we can troubleshoot the effectiveness, right? And think about how can I increase the quality of these activities that I'm doing to bring in clients and new business. We can't really optimize what we're not doing consistently. So we do the consistency first. And I say all of this because I want to just, as a point of encouragement, remind you that entrepreneurship and marketing also is just a constant practice of making adjustments and improvements. And that, and understanding that's just part of the process, will help you. And, and you are practicing evaluation and improvement. Uh, it calms you down, right? You calm down because you're not freaking out that everything is wrong and going to hell in a handbasket. You can calm down and realize this is just part of the process. This is part of the process. When I feel like something's not working I stop and I evaluate, I improve and keep going. And that's the process of entrepreneurship going on and on forever. That's always what it's going to be. And that's why we love it. That's why I've learned to enjoy and love it. It's a constant puzzle. It's a constant invitation to be problem solving and making things better and seeing improvement, which is what we as entrepreneurs are really our best at. So this is why we want to keep the marketing plan simple and have a handful of activities, because the more activities we have, the more things we're tracking, the more overwhelmed, the more difficulty with follow-through and staying consistent. The simpler we keep it, the better we can become, and the more time we can spend in our zone of genius. When you take time to do this process now, especially here we are in the middle of the year, you have some good data on the year so far. You'll have so much more clarity on what's working and what's not and how you want to adjust and how you want to monitor your progress all the way through, right? So many entrepreneurs are drifting through their business and thinking things aren't working and the cash register isn't ringing like we want it to. But it's almost never true that nothing is working. There's always things that are working. There's always things that are not working. It's this process that will give you clarity on what is working and what's not and why, so that you can improve and you can amplify and lean into the things that are working and improve the things or get rid of the things that aren't and make those adjustments and keep going, right? It's a much more productive stance and helps your goals become much more achievable than just running around feeling like nothing's working. So I want to remind you that you're the CEO of your business. And if you create this rhythm of evaluation and tracking and improvement, this mid-year reset just becomes part of that rhythm, right? You're not starting over. I hate to think about we start over every month. I don't look at my numbers that way. I'm looking at things on a rolling 12-month basis, right? So that I'm never feeling like I'm starting all over again. It's just we're continuing the growth. We're growing as humans, we're growing as CEOs, and we're growing as a business and just course correcting along the way as we go. So that's what I have for you today, but I want to give you one piece of action, an action that you can take as a result of what you learned and if there's any support I can offer. I want you to pull up any data that you have from the first half of 2026, even if it's just revenue data or revenue and expense data, and start looking at each of the 3 simple marketing steps that I talked about and evaluating each one of those. And think about where you have made gains, where you want to be making gains, And next week I'm gonna walk through the full tracking process and share that with you because really our businesses are always telling us a story. And when we have a system to track it, it makes it so much easier to listen to the wisdom that's already inside of us in our businesses and really improving as we go. And just as a last note, this is the work dialing in your marketing like this. Until it's consistently creating clients and revenue for your business is what we work on together in my 90-Day Marketing Accelerator, which is my small group coaching program. And I'm kicking off my next cohort for that on July 7th, and it will run to the beginning of October. You so appreciate it. I'll see you soon. Bye. All right. Bye-bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I wanna invite you to become part of my community. 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