5 Best Ways to See If Your Marketing Plan Works [BRANDBUZZ]

5 Best Ways to See If Your Marketing Plan Works

The year is kicking off and it’s time to do some reflection, not just of yourself, but of your business. Without evaluation, your brand and marketing plan become meaningless. Finding out what works and what doesn’t shouldn’t be a tedious investigation, it should be embraced as a crucial step to your overall marketing strategy. The start of the year presents a great opportunity to learn what needs to be tweaked.

Here are the 5 Best Ways to Evaluate the Success of Your Marketing Plan

Customer Reviews

Start here, what do your clients think of your performance? Search through online reviews, Google your company name, and try to go a step further with surveys and customer feedback. Don’t look at the outliers, look for trends in your customer response. One negative review may not impact your marketing plan but multiple should raise red flags.

ROI

Return on investment should be a major concern when it comes to almost any business decision. Check the money you spent on your 2016 marketing plan against the results. If you’re organized you should be able to measure the amount spent on each campaign, versus the amount of sales each campaign brought to your business.

The Sales Numbers

This might be the quickest method to seeing how 2016 worked out for your company, but it’s also the vaguest when it comes to evaluating your marketing plan. While your sales numbers are of huge importance, remember to take into account any rise in prices or expansion of the business to get a complete picture.

Measuring the Metrics

You put a lot of effort into your online plan and presence so be sure to look at the data:

Unique visitors: The best indication of your site’s overall traffic

Search engine traffic: This number will give you a clear indication of your SEO efforts

Bounce rate: A high bounce rate indicates visitors don’t like what they find on your site.

Inbound links: This number is an indication that other people like your content enough to link to it

Competitor Response

This might be the most telling of all marketing plan indicators. If competitors rush to put out copies of your efforts or work to one-up your products or services, the plan is working and working well. If you notice no competitor reaction, then it may be time to innovate for 2017.

When taken together these 5 methods of measurement will paint a clear picture of what’s working and what needs to be enhanced for 2017, and there will have to be enhancements. The coming year will bring new marketing trends, tools, and techniques.

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