Evaluating Your Marketing Process
Essential to your overall marketing campaign

Carefully evaluating marketing strategies and performance will keep your market presence strong.

After implementing a marketing program, you should evaluate your program's performance. Your program should have performance standards to compare with actual results. Research industry norms and past performance to help you to develop appropriate standards.

Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Begin the review process early and repeat it often. You should fine-tune your plan and eliminate elements that are not working for you. Don't wait until problems occur.

Items you should review include, but are not limited to:

• Your market share.
• Your quarterly performance goals.
• Your sales figures.
• Customer demographics changes.
• What your competition is doing.

You should also gage which parts of your marketing plan are generating sales and making money, therefore:

• Track your procedures.
• Identify which of your promotional strategies are being the most effective.

In some cases, tracking effectiveness isn't easy to do or gage, but where you can, tabulating the results and customer information is very valuable and helpful in deciding which strategies to continue and which to throw out.

You probably will use one or more of the promotional strategies mentioned below, and the types of media whose effectiveness you'll want to track include:

• TV or radio ads
• Direct marketing (flyers, bulletins, etc.)
• Trade shows and other events
• Internet marketing
• Telemarketing
• Newspaper and magazine ads
• Classified ads

These can all be tracked using canned or creative methods.

The Beneficial Database
It's helpful to have a database structure in place to record the information above. This may take some planning, but is well worth it in the long-run. The customer data is extremely valuable to your future marketing efforts. (Make sure you routinely back up the database and keep copies in a safe place.)

(You can get a lot of help via the Internet for steps to track these and other media that you've used or are planning to. Click here for some resources.)

And Finally . . .  

You should perform marketing audits on an annual basis, at the very least.