Before you start planning your marketing efforts, it’s important to take a step back and figure out where you are right now. You want to make decisions that are more than just gut instinct, right? Ideally, you’d base them on what’s actually worked in the past—on the results you’re already seeing.
Marketing retrospective helps you figure out:
- What’s working: ICP, channels, and strategies that are delivering results.
- What’s not working: Where resources are being drained without meaningful returns.
- Where the opportunities are: The areas with the most potential for growth (your most promising experiments or something you know will work)
- What to focus on next: Defining your priorities for the next quarter so you can move from experiments to scalable efforts that deliver impact.
Open a Google Spreadsheet and start putting it all together.
Filling out this template might seem easy, but trust me, it’s one of the toughest things you’ll do. When there’s a lot happening in your marketing, it’s so easy to get lost or slip into autopilot. This exercise is designed to help you stay focused and keep your thoughts from scattering in a million directions.
Here’s my advice: don’t rush it.
Break it into smaller steps over a few days. Take your time, revisit it, and let your insights settle. You’ll likely need to look at it multiple times before you reach clear conclusions from your retrospective.
Also, check out our guide on how to run an end-year retrospective and build a marketing strategy for the next quarter.
In fact, they are really useful! Especially the template on the ICP. It allowed us to take a much broader look at what information is useful and why, to look at the target segment from a broader perspective, at our company's ability to meet their needs. It helps to structure the information and make it “clean.”
I admit it's a little overwhelming for me! I don't wish to outsource this aspect of my business, but appreciate the template and may be able to use it to create my own more simplified / specific version.
I had picked a few columns from your sheet and added them to mine. Found them useful additions to my tracker.
We’ve simplified it slightly and adapted it to our needs. We are currently using it exclusively for content planning, specifically for blog posts, and are not including other channels at the moment. The prioritization feature has been especially helpful for our workflow. The templates help us a lot.
I make something similar in my line of work but it feels to me that there's more to know and discover on this template.
I didn't get to use the template myself but I shared it with one of my clients and she loved it💜
.png)
