Measuring your marketing… and shaping the future

It is important that when you are setting out your 2022 marketing strategy, you have measured your marketing from the year before.

• Which activities generated a good response?
• Did you meet your sales targets?
• Which tactics generated the most interest?
• What activities did not work?
• How well did your campaigns perform?
• Did you maximise on digital marketing?
• Did your website generate interest?

Measuring the impact of your marketing activities allows you to determine which tactics and channels your future budget and resource should be focussed on. In this blog we focus on five quick and easy ways of measuring your marketing and ensuring your 2022 strategy is heading in the right direction.

1. Complete our online marketing diagnostic
2. Assess your sales and marketing data
3. Understand performance against plans and outputs
4. Analyse customer and employee feedback
5. Review your competitor

1 Complete a marketing diagnostic

Developed by Horizon Works, Snapshot360 is a tool which measures your marketing in minutes. Through a series of questions covering strategy, brand, market awareness, customer experience and marketing tactics, we can quickly benchmark your current position.

Snapshot360 is a quick and straightforward way of capturing top-level information on your marketing. You’ll receive a benchmark report and recommendations…and it is free! You can take Snapshot360 here >

2 Assess your sales and marketing data

There will be data you can access across your business which will help you make decisions on what is working and what is not. It is important to look at both your sales and marketing data.

Sales data:

• What was your sales income against targets?
• Which products and services performed better over others?
• Which markets generated more demand in your products and services?
• Which channels generated the most sales leads?

Looking at this data will help you understand whether your marketing activities have had a direct impact on sales – and if your sales and marketing priorities are aligned.

Marketing data:

• Which areas of your website performed well?
• Did you get the right engagement across social media?
• Did your content hit the mark and generate interest?
• Did you generate positive press coverage?
• Did your event yield a return on investment?

You can access data for most marketing activities, particularly your website and digital activities – so use it to make informed decisions. Look at the effort you put into your marketing campaigns and events, for example. Did you generate the leads and did this turn into sales?

It is important that any future marketing efforts are put towards driving the right products and services to the right audiences and across the right markets. And you need to ensure that budget and resource reflect this.

3 Understand performance against plans

Having a masterplan in place is great, but you need to review it regularly to see where you are against your objectives and targets. Plotting your objectives out and understanding what you have achieved is a great start – but you also need to reflect on what did not work… and the reasons for this.

A useful tool is to create a dashboard of the critical areas that impact on your objectives and then plot out where you are and how you performed against these. Not only does it give you something to move forward with, but it will also benchmark what you did and did not achieve.

4 Analyse customer and employee feedback

Analysis of your customers’ and employees’ feedback should be conducted regularly and at the very least once a year. Customer feedback is paramount, but employee feedback is especially important too – particularly in building the right culture for your business and making sure you live up to your company values.

Feedback from customers can take various forms. It could be a regular questionnaire on service and quality or a more in-depth conversation which looks more at how you can embed your relationship further. It really depends on the products and service you offer. Whatever activity you conduct to analyse your customer’s satisfaction or perception of your business, products and service – it is important that you use this feedback and factor it into your plans. You can also maximise on your happy customers and use their positive experiences to create case studies and testimonials.

Staff ideas, opinions and feedback are crucial. Factors such as culture, company ethos and values are important to your team now more than ever. It is important you follow what you have set out in your vision and values statements! Also, implementing staff ideas and feedback can boost morale. It is also a valuable way of keeping your staff on board and building a positive workplace environment.

5 Review your competitors

An annual review of your competitors and how you are benchmarked and positioned against them is vital. How do you know whether you are still at the forefront of your industry and staying ahead of your competition?

There is a range of areas you can look at to determine how you are performing against your competitors:

• Have your competitors launched any new products and services?
• Have they entered any new markets?
• How do they engage with their audience online?
• How frequent is their social media, blogs and news?
• What type of content are they putting out there?
• Which events are they exhibiting at?
• Are they generating positive PR engagement?
• How does their brand, messaging and image stack up against yours?
• How are they performing on Google?
• Are they engaged with industry clusters and membership networks?

There are more areas you can look at, but the above will give you a good sense of how active your competitors are in getting their brand out there and will help you determine what they are doing differently.

Once you have done this, start plotting out what they do better than you, what you do better than them and then pin point areas of improvement, and generate ideas to factor into your plan!

Bring your findings together

Once you have researched your current situation you can summarise your key findings and set priorities. A valuable tool to do this at a high level is to use your findings and conduct a SWOT analysis. This will set out your current internal strengths and weaknesses, and your external opportunities and threats. This is a quick and easy way of capturing your current state of play and should be undertaken annually when you are developing your strategy and plan.

Using the findings from your research, you can now plan for 2022 – and shape your future!

You can read more blogs here >