It’s already over halfway through the year, and your team has been working tirelessly to execute the marketing strategies you established back in January. You believe you’re well on your way to achieving the goals you set for 2018, but how can you be sure?
The success of your marketing campaigns is too significant to leave to guesswork. Evaluating your efforts before the year’s end will help your team implement the best plan of action for reaching your business’ objectives.
Here are a few essential steps to take as you examine the state of your marketing:
1. Analyze Success
Before doing anything else, arrange your campaigns into three categories: Successful, Adequate, and Unsuccessful. Take a look at your efforts for each one and make note of the differences. Did you use the same approach all around or did you take certain steps for one campaign that you ignored for another? Investigate why specific campaigns achieved a certain level of success to determine which tactics were most effective. Chances are, they’ll be worth revisiting for what marketing lies ahead.
2. Review Lost Campaigns
There’s one more marketing category that we left out in the first step: Lost Campaigns. Check your ideas list and note which campaigns weren’t completed or even started. Ask yourself why these efforts were never actualized. Did your team simply not have enough time, or is your entire organization off track? You must assess your internal operations to see where things went awry before you can accurately plan to achieve future objectives.
3. Calculate Metrics
The best way to know for sure whether your marketing campaigns are producing results is to look at the numbers. While examining your strategies is an important aspect of measuring success, you have to put an actual price on it, too. Compare how much you’ve spent on marketing with revenue generated by those campaigns. If you’re spending more money on marketing than you’re getting out of it, you might be in trouble.
Start here: Calculate your ROI and other crucial marketing metrics using our marketing check-in guide.
4. Re-evaluate Buyer Personas
Do some research on the new customers you’ve acquired since the beginning of the year. Do their pain points and goals match up with your current buyer personas? Regularly assessing your target audience is essential to understanding how to continue marketing yourself and determining whether your strategies need a facelift. Update your personas based on these findings and make sure all marketing is built with prospective clients in mind.
5. Make a Game Plan
Once you’ve assessed how your marketing efforts have performed thus far, it’s time to put that information to use. Tailor your future strategies to the outcome of your findings by doubling your efforts on methods that have proved useful. For campaigns that haven’t produced the desired results, you should either tweak them to work out the kinks or halt them altogether. However, your new plan shouldn’t just be about your old strategies. Take the time to come up with new campaign ideas and add them into the mix, as well.
Taking the time to evaluate your marketing campaigns is crucial to modify your strategies and achieve your end-of-year goals, but looking at your operations twice a year isn’t enough to be successful. You’ll need to review your methods and marketing results at least once a quarter if you want campaigns that go above and beyond. Remember, the more energy you put into your marketing, the higher its profit will be.