Marketing tips that may be implemented immediately: Evaluate the success of your current marketing actions
Article written by Jannie Rossouw, Head: Sanlam Business Market
In order to properly address this question, we should take a moment to consider the definition of marketing.
Simply put, this is everything we do to communicate our business (in respect of our product or service offers) to existing and new clients within our selected target market.
Evaluation is a continuous process of testing to determine how well our selected marketing mix (the elements we selected) performs against the targets that were set and the market trends within our specific industry.
Please complete the evaluation matrix below and award a point of 1 (inadequate performance) to 5 (meets all the selected targets) to evaluate the performance of you selected marketing mix. Choose “N/A” if you do not make use of the specific element(s). However, ask yourself, “Why not?”
| Marketing element | Point (mark selected answer with “x”) |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Note – this is not a complete list, but includes the most important elements | N/A | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Brand identity | ||||||
| Newspaper advertisements | ||||||
| Advertorials | ||||||
| Radio | ||||||
| TV | ||||||
| Public promotions/articles | ||||||
| Direct marketing/mail/e-mail | ||||||
| Sales letter | ||||||
| Network functions/opportunities | ||||||
| Telemarketing | ||||||
| Events/talks | ||||||
| Newsletter | ||||||
| Website marketing (banners) | ||||||
| Referrals/recommendations by satisfied clients | ||||||
| Sales person/staff | ||||||
| Special offers | ||||||
Use the results in order to decide on which elements to use more or less of.
Below are some more tips on how to determine your marketing success.
- Ask clients where they heard of your business. Weigh the feedback against the above evaluation matrix.
- Select specific marketing elements through which you want to market selected offers. Record the successes.
- Test various headings for advertisements and e-mail campaigns. Determine which headings work best and use these in the future.
- Publish useful articles and offer free reports. Use these to collect clients’ contact information. The number of responses is a good indicator of the subjects that interest your target market. Use these more.
- Use business opportunities to act as speaker and to thereby establish yourself as an expert on your product or service within your target market. This is one way to widen your business network and to create enquiries about, or interest in your product/service.
- When you take on brand name positioning projects (e.g. participation in a trade show) it is important that you determine your evaluation criteria before and after the show.
- There are surely many other ways of testing the success of your marketing mix. See this as a start to objective measurement. Establish the practice of measurement in your business.
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