7 Ways to Evaluate Your Marketing Plan
After investing time in the development of your marketing plan, evaluate the plan to determine how effective it is in achieving established objectives. There are seven basic ways to evaluate any marketing plan for better results and profit.
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Goals
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Establish easily measurable objectives for your plan. Setting objectives helps all members of your marketing team and others, such as your sales organization, work in unison to achieve goals. Establish objectives for sales volume by salesperson, market and product lines. Another measurable sales objective is the number of new customers acquired.
Strategies
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Examine your plan to make sure you have clearly defined how you plan to achieve identified goals. For example, a strategy to penetrate a new market could be to become the lowest-cost provider.
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Target Markets
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Make sure your plan has clearly delineated the ideal target markets for each product or service you offer. Target markets should be selected based on how well your offerings serve that market, the extent of competition and the projected profit for each market considered.
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats
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Make sure your plan includes an accurate description of your company's and its products, strengths and weaknesses. It should also identify opportunities available, such as a new market for an existing product. To plan for unforeseen problems, identify threats that could impact plan achievement. A threat example could be a limited supply of materials needed to produce one of your products.
Differentiation
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Review how you will portray your company and its offerings to make sure you are differentiated from the competition. Make sure you have developed a unique selling proposition, or USP. An example of a USP is, if you are providing the same service or product as someone else, you need to be able to provide it quicker or cheaper. Or, if you're a smaller startup and your competing with a big company, provide better customer service.
Planned Activities
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Make sure you have an adequate budget to execute the activities planned, that you have defined activities that can be realistically accomplished and that they provide the highest estimated return for the dollars invested.
Supporting Tools
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Review your inventory of marketing tools and make sure you have provided effective tools to support marketing initiatives. One tool is marketing collateral, such as a printed marketing collateral solutions kit salespeople can provide to prospects. Such a toolkit could include background about the company, a sell sheet describing each product, and copies of press releases and articles about the company and its products and services.
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