How To Assess Your Marketing Efforts In 3 Simple Steps

Assessing small business marketing efforts is essential to the success of your campaigns. Once you have a formal marketing strategy in place, you will need to follow it and evaluate its effectiveness. In so doing, you'll determine whether your strategy is on-target, or how it needs to change.

There are just three basic steps involved in marketing assessment. To determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and increase your chances of success in small business, you'll need to run through a process of monitoring, assessing, and reviewing.

1. Monitor Marketing Efforts

All marketing efforts should have been implemented based on a plan of some kind. This plan will work as the basis for your assessment efforts. If you jumped head-long into marketing without a plan, take a moment now to look back at what you have done and put the plan in writing - it doesn't have to be anything fancy. This will give you a better tool for evaluating the overall marketing campaign, as well as individual projects.

Using that plan, identify where you have implemented marketing. Make it a point to monitor each project by actually revisiting sites from time to time. In addition, use website and marketing tools to track progress wherever you can. If web-based, you can track the number of visitors and other telling factors including the time spent on a site, the number of conversions which result in orders, contact, sales, and so on. Another of the best ways to monitor marketing efforts is to ask customers and clients how they found you. This will give you an idea of which efforts are netting the highest results. It's simple, yet oh so revealing.

2. Assess Marketing Efforts

As you monitor your paid, free and low-cost marketing campaigns, you will gain valuable insight into which efforts are actually reaching consumers and translating into business and sales. The next step is to compile what you have learned into data for assessment.

This can be done very formally using a variety of software and programs, or less formally by simply creating spread-sheets and using word processing programs. The key in any case is to format data into readable, scan-able data for reference - something that makes sense to you and that you can easily understand. Once compiled, you want to look at several factors, including:

-What efforts result in the highest traffic and/or exposure?
-What efforts or traffic sources convert into the highest number of sales or revenue?
-What efforts are not returning results?

And for each of those questions, ask yourself why that might be - is the effort worthless or worthwhile? Perhaps worthwhile if some changes were made to make it more effective?

3. Marketing Efforts in Review

Now that you've taken a subjective look at your strategy, it is time to review your efforts and modify your original marketing plan. Find out which efforts are most cost-effective, or have the best return on investment. Decide what efforts should be kept and which need changing, or decide that an entirely different strategy must be implemented which nets better results.

To be a success in small business, you must take time to plan for marketing and implement an effective strategy otherwise it can be very hit and miss (and in some cases, more miss than hit!) For a business to grow and thrive, marketing needs to be ongoing so that your marketing plan continually meets your target audience's needs.