When you decide you need to redo your marketing strategy, what do you do first? I hope you create a detailed marketing plan. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants when marketing won’t get you very far. You’ll never know if your marketing strategies have been successful if you don’t have a plan in place to measure your efforts against. So how do you know if you’ve succeeded in meeting your plan’s goals?
You need to create a marketing plan that includes measurable goals.
It doesn’t sound as hard or tedious as it sounds. The key to make something measurable is to add numbers. While you’re creating your marketing plan, make all of your goals, often referred to as objectives, specific and clear so that they can be easily measured.
Marketing Objectives
You need a “marketing objectives” section in your marketing plan, which is where you put to paper what you want your marketing plan to achieve in the coming year. Each marketing objective should include a description of what you what to accomplish along with numbers to give you something concrete to aim for. For instance, you can say you want to become one of the top selling baseball hat companies in the American marketplace by the end of the year. That’s a somewhat measureable goal by you looking at the marketplace at the end of the year, but it will be easier to measure if you add some numbers. Let’s say you want over 35% of the American baseball hat marketplace to belong to you. This is a much better goal because it’s measurable with numbers, meaning there won’t be any ambiguity of whether you met your goal.
Benchmarking
You can keep track of your results by including specific benchmarks in your plan. Examples of benchmarks could include “selling 500 widgets by the first quarter,” or “having 100 people visit our Web site to learn about the product by XX date.” Now, you could have said “having more people visit our Web site” but by adding a number and date to the benchmark, and the reason for visiting your Web site (which is measurable by seeing which pages of your site they visit), you’ve just made that benchmark measurable.
Now you’ve got an easy way to see if your marketing objective is being met, and if not, you’ll know you need to change your strategy. By adding a specific date, you can take action now rather than waiting until next year to figure out what you were doing wrong.
Keeping Track of Results
You need a way to track how well your marketing plan is working. Schedule monthly or quarterly meetings and spell out in writing what your definition of marketing success is. If one goal is to create a higher sell-thru rate, you’ll need to decide on a specific number that will constitute a success for sell-thru numbers by a certain date. If you don’t meet this specific objective when you get numbers back from the suppliers and stores, you’ll know you need to work with your packaging or advertising strategies.
Also write down how you intend to track sales and costs, and at what point will your marketing plan change? For instance, you might tweak your marketing plan if you lose 10% of customers in the first quarter. Marketing isn’t science – you can use whatever metrics you’d like to measure success. Just make sure you always measure and measure consistently.
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