How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Strategic Marketing

Marketing efforts that are ineffective are a drain of time and money for your company; by evaluating each strategy, you can pare down a marketing plan to the most powerful parts. For the most efficient marketing plan, conduct a review of your marketing strategy periodically throughout the year. Begin each new effort by building in monitoring mechanisms that will make the evaluation process a natural part of each marketing campaign or activity.

Instructions

1. Add an analysis tool to your website. With a simple, free program like Google Analytics, you can track user behavior in relation to your website. An analytics program will allow you to see how many people visited your site, the time they stayed, pages visited and bounce rate. You can monitor how people are arriving at your website, which can help evaluate the success of an advertisement or link elsewhere on the Internet. By tracking web traffic after the launch of a new marketing campaign, you can evaluate how effective it was in driving users to your site.

2. Track the progress of strategic marketing goals. Assign quantitative and qualitative measurements of success to each of your marketing goals: increased foot traffic, better name recognition or more internet orders, for example. Throughout the year, track the progress toward the end goal to see the overall effectiveness of your strategic marketing efforts. If you find that one goal is lagging behind, ramp up efforts accordingly.

3. Monitor sales to check for increases that correlate with marketing campaigns. Do not expect sales to jump immediately after the launch of a new marketing effort; often, it takes time for the message to permeate the consumers' consciousness. Take note of immediate increases, because they may indicate a particularly effective marketing campaign. Check the increase in profits against the cost of the marketing effort to get the return on investment.

4. Talk to members of your target audience. Customers can be an excellent source of feedback about your marketing efforts. If your goals are difficult to monitor, such as raising awareness about your brand or promoting new features of an existing product, interaction with the customer base is crucial. You can send out surveys by email, interview people on the street or call your long-time customers.

5. Include identification codes on promotions. When you are running a marketing campaign that includes a discount, attach a specific code to the discount that the customer must input into an online ordering form or give to a cashier when buying in person. Choose a different code for each publication or website so that you can track the number of people who come in from each source.

References

• Marketing Professor: Questions for Evaluating Marketing Results So Far This Year
• Technorati: Evaluating Your Small Business Marketing Strategies