7 Ways to Evaluate Your Marketing Plan
By Stuart Ayling
Business owners often find it difficult to know whether
their marketing tactics are working. This can be especially
tricky when you use a combination of marketing activities
simultaneously, or if using personal-contact tactics such as
networking.
No matter what business you're in, your marketing should be
accountable. So here's a few ways to evaluate how well you're
doing.
1) Look at your sales (or fee income).
They should be going up! But be careful about what you
measure. Some firms have a longer sales cycle than others. To
get an accurate picture you might need to also measure the
number of new leads being generated, or the number of
appointments, or the number of billable hours achieved.
Remember discounts or variances in fees will affect total
sales values.
2) Ask your clients. Check to find out
where they heard of you. Most businesses never ask this
question and miss out on gleaning valuable insights into how
clients select a service provider.
3) Does your advertising and/or promotional
activity produce direct responses? It should. If your answer is "I don't know" then
you've got some work to do. In addition to 2) above, there are
some things you can do to improve response rates.
-- Firstly, make sure you are advertising in the right
media. Choose media to suit your selected audience. Be as
specific as possible. And avoid rejecting options just because
they don't look "exciting", such as trade journals that might
have relatively small readership. Importantly, check with your
audience to make sure they actually do read the publication.
-- Use a strong headline that asks a pertinent question, or
gives a solution-oriented statement.
-- Include a clear call-to-action. Tell people what they
should do. For example: Ring today for your free appointment;
Ask for our free information sheet.
-- Include multiple methods of contact. Phone, email, and
web site are all important. Give prospects a choice of how to
contact you.
4) Do your networking activities create new
opportunities for you? One of the major principles of
effective networking is to "give" rather than "sell". That is,
you should look to help others as you spread word about your
services. But this softly, softly approach can make it hard to
measure effectiveness.
To measure your networking activities make sure you track
the source of incoming enquiries. Then see if any of your
visible/tangible tactics can be credited with generating the
enquiry. If not, then maybe you can safely say it was a
referral generated by networking. This is made a lot easier if
you're a member of a lead-generating club such as BNI or
Leads. You'll get specific feedback each week from these
groups.
5) Do your marketing tactics make it easier to sell
your services? To do this your marketing activities
and/or material should do the following:
-- Attract qualified prospects (who have shown a specific
interest in your services).
-- Anticipate and diffuse potential questions/concerns from
prospects.
-- Be easy to use when personally selling to prospects. For
example: material should be relevant; images/charts easy to
understand; and be presented in a format the prospect will be
likely to keep.
-- Focus on your client needs and your points of difference
(Unique Selling Proposition).
6) Check your sales conversion rate. The
best approach here is to look at your historical records and
determine whether your conversion (or closure) rate has
improved. "Selling" is an important part of the "marketing"
function, so make sure you assess your success at closing the
sale, rather than just focus on generating new leads.
7) Does your plan have a positive return on
investment (ROI)? Does it bring in enough new/repeat
business to justify the expense? Rather than just look at the
"marketing budget" as one total, you really need to evaluate
the cost effectiveness of each specific marketing activity.
Even if you think you're getting a great ROI overall, maybe
you can do even better by changing or eliminating unproductive
tactics.
(c) 2004 Stuart Ayling
Stuart Ayling runs Marketing Nous, an Australasian
marketing consultancy that specialises in marketing for
service businesses. He helps clients to improve their
marketing tactics, attract more clients, and increase revenue.
For additional marketing resources, including Stuart's popular
monthly newsletter, visit his web site at
www.marketingnous.com.au
.gif)
