How to Evaluate Marketing Strategies

Evaluation is an important part of marketing: it helps your company eliminate ineffective strategies and develop an overall plan that helps build your business. By scheduling regular evaluations of your marketing plan, you can save wasted money by modifying or eliminating campaigns that are not reaching your target market or garnering the response you need. As you plan, build in mechanisms to monitor the success of each marketing effort tomake evaluation cheaper and easier.

Instructions

1. Check the response of sales. Because the end goal of most marketing efforts is to raise sales and profits, use the numbers to measure how your campaigns are affecting customer behavior. Look at the sales before a marketing campaign, during its rollout and for six months afterward; keep track of the long-term response to monitor delayed effects.
2. Send out a questionnaire. An easy and inexpensive way to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing technique is to talk directly to consumers. If you want to check on how well you are promoting new features or services to existing clients, talk to customers who have been with your company for some time. To gauge how a marketing campaign has impacted customer perception, send out surveys to a random sampling of your target audience to see how familiar they are with your company. Ask new customers where they heard about you to see which of your marketing strategies is the most persuasive.
3. Monitor the progress towards strategic business goals. Marketing can be used to support your overall business objectives. At regular intervals, conduct an evaluation of each goal. If you find that the progress toward one is slower than the others, your marketing strategies for that goal may be ineffective or need to be ramped up.
4. Compare your marketing strategies with those of your competitors. If you are employing similar strategies, you can compare them to find differences in frequency, quality, content and response. Note the number of places competitors' advertisements show up, how many social media followers they have, how their profits changed after a campaign or how they have altered their other marketing strategies.
5. Evaluate the return on investment. Even if your marketing strategies are helping to achieve your company goals, they can be unsustainable if they cost more than they make. Calculate the cost of each campaign and the man-hours that go into each project, then measure that cost against the campaign's profits. If there is no change in profit, the campaign may not be worth keeping.

By Elizabeth Smith, eHow Contributor
http://www.ehow.com/