5 ways to evaluate your marketing plan.
For many, marketing is little more than a tick-box exercise; they decide on a course of action, put it into practice and then…nothing. They assume that because they’re regularly conducting their marketing tasks, results are sure to follow.
However, that approach neglects a fundamental piece of the marketing puzzle:
Evaluation.
Essentially, marketing is about experimentation. It’s about being willing to try new strategies, analyze their effectiveness, and then alter your strategy accordingly. It’s about adopting a fluid approach rather than a static one.
But how do you evaluate the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy? How do you know what’s helping you achieve your business goals and what should probably be tweaked or abandoned altogether?
Understanding your goals.
Firstly, it’s important to widen the lens of your marketing goals. Often we assume that marketing strategies should focus solely on increasing revenue but the most effective marketing plans often encompass a far broader range of business goals.
For example, you might want to devise a marketing plan that focuses on increased revenue AND any or all of the following:
· Increasing brand awareness
· Generating high-quality leads
· Growing and maintaining thought leadership
· Increasing customer value
· Empowering your colleagues
So, now you’ve defined the business goals you want your marketing efforts to achieve, let’s explore 5 ways you can evaluate their effectiveness.
Sales numbers.
This is the metric that most people turn to when they want to evaluate whether their marketing is paying off: have sales numbers increased since you ramped up your marketing campaign?
However, while this is a vital way to assess in very general terms whether you’re headed in the right direction, it only really paints a full picture when it’s used in conjunction with additional evaluation methods.
Return on investment.
Looking at ROI is, of course, one of the most important ways to judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, rather than looking at your overall marketing spend, it’s important to break your calculations down by campaign. So, if you’ve spent $5000 on an ad campaign, be sure to tally that against the revenue generated by that particular campaign so you know whether you’ve achieved the ROI you were hoping for.
Sales team feedback.
Your frontline sales team can deliver vital information on the effectiveness of your recent marketing campaigns, so be sure to ask for their feedback.
What do customers tell them during sales calls or meetings? Are they aware of the products and services you’ve been marketing recently? How are they reacting to your messaging and your brand as a whole?
If their reactions are mainly positive, you know you’re getting something right but if it’s overwhelmingly negative it would be useful to dig a bit deeper by talking to your sales team and thinking about how to align your marketing strategy more closely with their needs.
Customer feedback.
Similarly, it’s always a good idea to use direct customer feedback to assess your marketing campaigns. You can use feedback surveys to discover how customers heard about your recent product launch, your sale, how they first learned about your brand, and a whole host of other data related to your marketing. If you’re struggling to find people to complete these surveys, consider offering customers an incentive, such as a discount on their next purchase.
Brand awareness opportunities.
Have you been inundated with invitations recently? Perhaps you’ve been asked to feature as a guest on a podcast or blog, invited to speak at an event or conference, or a slew of new vendors have inquired about stocking your products.
If so, you know you’re doing something right; not only is your brand awareness growing, it’s clearly saying the right things about you!
When people get in touch with you in this way, be sure to ask them what inspired them to make contact. This is a great way to measure the effectiveness of certain things that are harder to pin down with concrete metrics. For example, it might have been a particularly inspiring LinkedIn post that prompted the podcast invitation but if you don’t ask, you’ll never know which of your marketing actions are paying off in this way.
When you spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and resources on marketing your business, you want to know that it’s paying off; you want to know that it’s going to help you move the needle on your goals and keep your organization moving forward.
Which is why evaluation methods should be a foundational aspect of your overall strategy. Because when you know for certain which of your marketing efforts are reaching the right audience in the right way — and which are going largely unnoticed — you can double down on the things that are working well, start refining the things that aren’t, and eventually reap the benefits of a fluid, proactive marketing plan.
At Emerje, we specialize in supporting organizations like yours develop and refine a comprehensive marketing strategy that perfectly aligns with their goals — and we’d love to do the same for you. Get in touch to find out we can help.