Reviewing your marketing activities

Before you start to plan your marketing activities for the coming year it’s really helpful to understand what worked and what didn’t during the previous year. This will allow you to make some important decisions, such as:

  • Stop wasting time and money on activities that are not delivering a return
  • Come up with ways to improve activities that are showing a degree of success
  • Continue with activities that are working well
  • See the gaps! What haven’t you tried that could make a difference in 2019?

How to review your marketing activities

Did you achieve the marketing results you were hoping for?

This obviously assumes that you set goals in the first place! Or perhaps you had a gut feeling of what a good result might look like, but didn’t quite get around to writing it down! It’s certainly true that what gets measured gets done. You want to avoid getting to the end of the year just to find out that a particular activity hasn’t been working. You could have reacted much more quickly and rectified the situation or avoided throwing money away.

How can you measure marketing success?

Here are some methods you could use to measure the results of your marketing activities:

1.  Firstly take a look at the financial return. You might measure this by value of sales generated from:

  • Each networking group you belong to
  • Pay Per Click
  • Website sales (or enquiries that converted to sales)
  • Telemarketing (leads that converted to a sales)
  • Exhibition
  • Postcard campaign

To obtain this level of detail you need to track where your leads have come from during the year. This could be your second marketing measurement.

2.  Number of leads generated through each marketing activity as per list in No. 1.

You might then want to look at each marketing activity in detail.

So your third marketing measurement might be:

3.  Review each marketing activity

  • Number of website visitors month by month
  • Number of contacts added to your email marketing system
  • Number of click throughs to your website generated from your newsletter
  • Number of new pages added to your website (article/blog posts)
  • Number of visits to your website from your Social Media channels
  • Number of networking meetings attended and follow up meetings booked

Building relationships is important in most businesses and a crucial step to gaining clients. The results in No. 3 are an indication of how engaged you are with your contacts.

There may be some eye opening facts that come out of this exercise! I’ve witnessed several ‘bing’ moments when going through this exercise with clients. It’s easy to gather contacts, but unless you have a process to stay on the radar and build the relationship, by the time they need you they will have forgotten you.

Making better marketing decisions for the coming year

Having reviewed your marketing activities it will certainly help you to make informed decisions for the next 12 months.

As an example when a networking membership comes up for renewal you will know exactly the return that it brings to the sales of your business and whether it makes good sense to renew. Perhaps it’s time for a change? If that’s the case you will want to ask yourself why it hasn’t worked as you’d hoped it would. Is it the organisation or perhaps your approach could do with refining?

Now you are ready to develop your marketing plan

 

Having reviewed your marketing results you will have an idea of where improvements are required or you may have thought about new marketing activities to support what you are already doing.

If you’ve go this far and still feeling that you:

  • Don’t know where to start
  • Nervous about saying or doing something wrong
  • Awkward about saying how brilliant you are
  • Frustrated by your ad-hoc and scattergun approach to marketing
  • Disappointed with the results

No amount of tweaking your marketing activities will resolve these issues. It’s your MARKETING STRATEGY that needs attention.

I help Solo Business Owners who are brilliant at what they do, develop their marketing strategy so that they generate quality enquiries from clients they love to work with.

I can help you in two ways:

Get on and do it yourself with: Marketing Planning Programme – Online

Or work with me in a group mastermind where you have my daily, weekly and monthly guidance, support and accountability in: Marketing-ACTION-PROFITS