How to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing plan

Any seasoned marketer knows that a marketing plan is ineffective without evaluating data. Understanding how to evaluate a Marketing Plan can save your company time, money and ensure a return on investment.

How should marketers evaluate their plans? For every marketing plan curated, marketers should closely track and monitor the plan as it progresses over time. This article helps marketers uncover what should be tracked to best evaluate the effectiveness of a plan.

What Should You Use to Evaluate For a Marketing Plan?

Here are a few metrics that should be used to evaluate your marketing plan.

1. Web traffic
2. Marketing goals
3. Marketing Qualified Leads
4. MROI
5. Channels & Campaigns
6. Customer Satisfaction
7. Cost Per Outcome (CPO)

 1. Web Traffic 

Measuring online traffic over time is an important metric to track. How much traffic is your website driving compared to last month, or last year? An improvement in the number of website users means an increase in online visibility and a potential increase in marketing leads. 

2. Marketing Goals

When evaluating the effectiveness of a marketing plan, you must compare against established goals. Your plan should be goal-driven right from the start. Here are a few tips on setting  marketing goals:

• Use SMART goals; Specific, Achievable, Timely, Measurable, and Realistic. List your goals so you know what to measure. 
• Determine key marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) used to measure that goal. When measuring success, which marketing metrics matter to your business?
• Your marketing goals should be directly related to the goals of your business.

Reviewing KPIs shows whether your marketing plan is on track to meet your goals. You’ll also be able to allocate marketing spend to those activities that bring in the best results. 

3.Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

The effectiveness of your marketing plan is not only about measuring the number of online marketing leads, but the quality of the leads you are driving. The qualification of your leads is important to business success.

If you find that your marketing leads are not translating to sales qualified leads, consider:

• Meeting sales team: Review with your sales team the definition of a sales-qualified. Qualified leads should be reflected in your customer persona research. The content you create should be ICP friendly. Adjust your marketing plan and campaigns to fit the framework of qualified leads.
• Finding campaigns/channels driving unqualified leads: Using Google Analytics goal tracking, you can evaluate the campaigns or channels responsible for driving high volumes of unqualified leads. Once this is determined, adjust audience settings, keywords, campaign messaging, or something else to better target your ideal audience.

4. Marketing Return on Investment (ROI) 

 “Marketers love empty calorie marketing, which is why stepping onto an ROI scale feels so humbling.” – Scott Todaro

Another way to evaluate a marketing plan is to look at your MROI (marketing ROI) and the factors that have impacted your return on investment.

• Are you paying more for leads than the actual number of new leads? Tracking allows you to see how many new leads are coming in. If you’re paying for lead generation, is it worth the investment or do you need to tweak your marketing strategy? 
• What is the cost of acquiring a new customer? When calculating this, be sure to factor in all marketing expenses, including the number of hours, costs of softwares and tools used to automate your efforts, and external help from agencies or freelancers.

5. Channels and Campaigns

When evaluating the effectiveness of your plan, one of the final steps is to make adjustments as needed. Keep these tips in mind during your evaluation:

• Evaluate the channels and campaigns that prospective customers are coming from. 
• Take the campaigns or channels performing the best, to emulate strategies or allocate more budget. 
• For campaigns or channels that are not performing, evaluate what you can do to make them more effective, or pause a campaign and reallocate your budget into another campaign or channel.

6. Customer Satisfaction

Don’t forget about your current customers or clients! Marketing doesn’t stop once a sale is finalized. Re-marketing can effectively improve retention rates whether you’re a product or service-based business. This will in turn improve your LTV as well.

Consumer satisfaction is another way to measure the effectiveness of a marketing plan, from the first interaction to after a sale is made.

Listening to what your consumers say can provide feedback on how your marketing plan aligns with your organization’s position, customer service, and its effectiveness. Consider using the following to get a sense of customer satisfaction:

• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• Online reviews
• Social listening

7. Cost Per Outcome

Cost per outcome is a measure of execution efficiency. It describes how much is being spent to achieve a specific metric.

CPO does not communicate business value, but it is useful to measure because it will tell you if your marketing activities are becoming more or less efficient at generating certain metrics. It’s important not to focus on empty calorie marketing. Your CPO may increase if your keywords become more expensive or competitive. CPO may decrease if you hone messaging to a target audience and conversion rates increase.

Marketers can decrease their CPO by:

• Market Research
• Segment Targeting
• A/B Testing
• Performance Adjusting

Evaluation of Marketing Plans is a Constant Effort

To see the results of an effective marketing plan, marketers should constantly measure and evaluate the plan’s performance, from beginning to end, with adjustments made along the way.

Planful’s marketing planning software can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing plans and improve the business value of marketing.