How should you evaluate?

Here are some steps you can follow to evaluate your marketing program: 

1. Measure your performance: Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your marketing program’s performance against your defined goals.
   What are you looking for?
   Here you are looking for more than just a yes/no response to the question ‘did we reach our KPI or not?’ If you want to go deeper into this, the next question could be ‘how far did we go over it or go under?’
2. Analyse your data: Analyse your performance data to identify trends and patterns, and to determine which marketing channels and tactics are most effective in driving results.
   What are you looking for?
   When you analyse your data from your website, customer relationship management software or sales figures, you are looking for trends and patterns. Are you seeing growth in certain areas among certain groups? Are you seeing the numbers on your website? Or is social media starting to take hold and generate traffic through to your business?
3. Solicit feedback from customers and stakeholders: Solicit feedback from customers and stakeholders to gauge their perception of your brand and marketing efforts. Turn your research spotlight on to more of the qualitative side of research and solicit feedback from people to gauge their perception of the messaging they see and how it’s delivered.  Then use a quantitative approach to determine the numbers of people who hold that view.
   What are you looking for?
   You’re looking for responses to creative, messaging and value propositions. This helps to determine the micro-elements of your marketing such as messaging headlines, tag lines, video, imaging, distribution, timing, or even the channel selection itself.
4. Review marketing budget: Evaluate your marketing budget in relation to the results achieved. Assess the return on investment (ROI) for each marketing activity to determine if the allocated budget is being used effectively. Consider reallocating budget or resources based on the performance of each marketing tactic to optimize your marketing program.
   What are you looking for?
   Highest return rather than lowest spend. Sometimes there can be the temptation to look at cost savings, but you’re investing in your marketing, you want the best return for the amount spent.
5. Continuously test and refine: Continuously test and refine your marketing program to improve its effectiveness and drive better results. Experiment with new tactics, measure their impact, and adjust your strategy accordingly.     
   What are you looking for?
   Here you are looking for return, or results that are better than your average marketing.

Remember, evaluating your marketing program is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and analysis. By taking a data-driven approach and regularly assessing your performance, you can optimise your marketing efforts and achieve better results over time.

What are some of the common measurement approaches that we could use? 

I have grouped these two around the intention of the customer. It’s important to keep this centre of mind while you are evaluating your marketing efforts.

• Website traffic: The number of visitors to a website is a common KPI in a marketing program. This metric can help to gauge the effectiveness of various marketing channels, such as search engine optimisation, social media, or paid advertising. Are you seeing a growth in traffic to your website? Are there certain days or times where traffic is highest? Are there certain sections of your website which are most popular or are there certain pages which are visited more often? If you developed landing pages as part of your campaign, how did they perform in the context of generating enquiries? In terms of tools to use, use the measurement tools that come with your web site.
• Social media: You can use the analytics that are part of the platform you have chosen. With analytics, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WeChat or whatever, the key here is to look at the direction that people take – where they started their journey from and where they arrived. With social media you can also look at the micro actions of commentary or engagement metrics like like, share and follow.
• Connections – phone, email, attendance: Another measurement tool you have when it comes to action is to look at people’s movement. This could be everything from the people who attend your events to the number of phone calls that you received this month. It could be enquiries via email or it could be web forms you received. It could be foot traffic to the pop up store that you placed in a large community event. Or it could even be foot traffic through the doors of your traditional brick and mortar store. If you’re looking to measure response from a prospective customers, it’s a given that you will be measuring how many phone calls or emails you get. This is traditionally the time to get your front office or sales people to ask ‘where did you hear about us?’ If you’ve ever heard that as a customer, it was part of a marketing evaluation process.

Effectiveness of message and service

• Brand Awareness: This measures the level of awareness and recognition of your brand among your target audience. It can help you assess the effectiveness of your brand-building efforts, such as advertising, public relations, and social media. This is likely to be done through focus groups and survey.
• Customer Satisfaction: This measures the level of satisfaction and loyalty of your customers. It can help you assess the effectiveness of your customer service, product quality, and overall customer experience. An extension of that is to measure.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): This measures the total revenue expected from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business. It can help you understand the long-term value of your customers and the effectiveness of your customer retention strategies. Most Customer Relationship Management software programs can track this.
• Leads Generated: This is the measurement of your success – the number of leads, or potential customers, generated through your marketing efforts. It can help you track the effectiveness of your lead-generation strategies, such as email campaigns, landing pages, or content marketing.
• Sales Revenue: This KPI measures the total revenue generated from sales. It can help you assess the overall financial impact of your marketing efforts on your business, and needs to be your complemented by your sales team’s (or platform’s) conversion rate.
• Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter. This can help to measure the effectiveness of website design and content, as well as the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Effectiveness of management of your marketing

• Return on Investment (ROI): This is an important evaluation – to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in generating revenue compared to the costs incurred.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This KPI measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. It can help you assess the efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts in acquiring new customers.
• Resources: We should also be measuring effectiveness of resources. Some key questions to ask here include: do we have the right number of people to carry out marketing? While often the question here is do we have enough people the better question to ask is do we have the right people? Are your suppliers providing you with the right content to engage with your target audiences? Are the other platforms that you are paying to advertise on delivering for you? Are the influencers that you are connecting with you giving you enough reach? Then internally asked these questions: do we have the right mix of people internally to effectively engage with our audience base?
• Budget:  We should also be measuring effectiveness of the budget. Go beyond the traditional ‘we spent too much’ or ‘we didn’t spend enough’. As much as possible break it down to how much money each cost centre brought in.