Assess Your Results

Back to: Business Planning 2 Marketing Basics: Video Course

 

Please note: the sound on this recording is a little low, you may wish to listen through headphones.

Marketing activities should always include monitoring your results. By doing so, you can be sure that your marketing approach is working or else you can move to a new activity which may work better. ​

​Monitoring your success in this way ensures that you make the most of your marketing dollars, rather than continually doing the same thing which may result in throwing good money after bad. ​

​Of course, changing tactics should always respect the time it takes for some marketing activities to take hold and become effective. ​

​In the planning stage it’s a good idea to think about how you are going to be able to assess your results. ​

​Choose your measures based on the ones that make the most sense to your activities. ​

​You could consider counting the number of sales during the period of a promotion as compared to a non-campaign month, for example. Or maybe you want to monitor ultimate profits from a period of marketing activity. ​

​Other measures may be clicks on digital ads, leaflets distributed, number of queries, use of vouchers etc. Whatever makes sense to that particular marketing activity. ​

​It’s also important to get feedback from your customers or clients as a consistent activity, so that you can see how your audience is responding to your products or services. ​

​Possible options for gathering feedback are: word of mouth recommendations, reviews, feedback forms, comments during in person sales, etc.​

​Once you have some measures which tell you what the take up was on your offer, and have gathered feedback, you can use this information to adjust your marketing if necessary. ​

​If results are meeting your expectation you could think about how to change your marketing to make it more effective. Perhaps you need a different image on your Google Ad, or a different strap line on your website landing page, or maybe that 10% off isn’t a big enough enticement for a sale – perhaps try a BOGO instead (if your budget supports that). ​

​Once you’ve decided on what to try next, you can implement the change, and reassess. ​

​It makes sense to build this cyclical process into all your marketing activities and over time, you will learn what works best for the audience you are seeking to attract. ​

​Before we end the session, let’s take a look at potential marketing mistakes.