Evaluating Marketing Strategy

Marketing Plans serves as a blueprints for any company’s sales strategy. They mention every detail of what has to come over the next year and what has to be altered and evaluated because of changes in the markets and all. Marketing should not be set in motion and left alone, It has to constantly reviewed , evaluated and adjusted in such a manner that it suits the company and satisfies the consumer requirements. If you understand how to judge your marketing plan is delivering, then results can save you time and money and help to ensure success of your business.

There are some of the ways to evaluate your marketing Strategy

ROI – Return on Investment:

Return on investment is always a major concern when it comes to marketing or any other business expense. It’s a general human psychology in business point of view, you put money for things which returns purely profits. The idea is to check whether the money you put into your marketing plan has resulted in a profit or not.  You must surely measure and maintain a detail about how much money is spent on each campaign of marketing your product  and compare it with the amount of sales you brought from each campaign specifically. The difference of these two measures tells us where we gained good amount of profit and where we have lost and accordingly we can take measures.

Sales Numbers

Reading the numbers can be the fastest and most basic way to determine whether your plan is working or not. For example, if your overall sales for last year from June 1 to September 1 totaled $100,000 and your total sales for this year totaled $150,000, you can deduce that your current marketing plan is having some sort of positive effect. Taking it into consideration in any rise in prices or expansion of the business, but when all is displayed and done in raw numbers, you are selling more than you did a year ago.

Customer Response

Marketing plans  can get a varied forms of information from the customer response in order to determine what type of reactions it has to create to develop the company’s marketing strategy. Doing surveys online and in person, general customer service feedback and online commentary and all can reveal what your customers think of your marketing and which campaigns have the greatest impact. Simple questions like "How did you find out about our seasonal sale?" can reveal which initiatives are reaching the customer and which market segments are making purchases more.

Expansion

If your marketing reach is expanding, then we can ensure that the plan is working effectively. Marketing that makes its way into new regions either by customer recommendation or natural growth indicates both a successful and popular product or experience and an effective marketing message. The expansion of your marketing budget is another sign that your plan is working well and has gained more support from the company and also the customer point of view.

Partner Response

Your marketing partners will offer feedback about whether your marketing plan is working effectively or not. Partner feedback reveals the effectiveness of your efforts in relation to associated brands, suppliers and vendors that are already available and established in the market and they also reveal the competition our product offering the other brands and vendors. These outside members of the team might feel the effects of a successful campaign before you do because they are often on the front lines and might have more direct customer interaction then actually we have. The same startegy goes for even a negative report. If your partners are asking when you will be releasing new marketing efforts, it might be time to change the market plan or to repair or patch up the old one with new strategies which increase the profits.

Salespeople

Outside salesmen are a great barometer for the measurement of effectiveness  of  marketing strategy of a company. Ask for feedback from your soldiers in the field to determine whether the message you are providing and the ways you are providing it are effective or not. You will be getting the feedback from anyone but these sales man are the people who directly interact with customers and come to know better about the product, but if the feedback is overwhelmingly negative or customers are completely unaware of your latest marketing efforts, your plan should be revised to better address existing clients and to suit the needs of your sales team.

Competitor Response

The actions of your competitors can often be very expressive when it comes to the success or failure of your marketing plan. If competitors rush to copy what you've done or try their best to one-up your initiatives, the plan is working much better. If your campaigns go largely ignored or there is an immediate negative response, there may be an issue or at least a question about what you've set in motion.