With the first quarter of the year completed, it’s time to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. And, if you find that your sales just haven’t brought the success you had planned, now is the time to identify where you need to make changes. Thankfully it’s still early enough in the year to turn around lackluster sales and achieve your year-end goals.

The key is to know what to look for when evaluating the success of your marketing efforts. There are four steps in the review: marketing activities completed; time line of those activities; customer and prospect responses to each activity; and your company’s responses to that customer feedback.

Marketing Activities Completed. The most important aspect of a successful marketing campaign is the implementation of the strategy. Marketing is all about reaching your target audience, and to do that requires some kind of action. Whether it is by direct mail, sales appointments, phone calls or email, marketing implementation is the action of communicating with your customers and/or prospects. When evaluating your marketing program, you first must think about the activities that you have or haven’t completed. If you’re still waiting to send out your first direct mail campaign, chances are that it’s a lack of marketing activities that is the issue.

Time Line of Marketing Activities. If you find that you have been completing the activities of your marketing plan, review when they were implemented. Marketing success depends not only upon activity but upon the right sequence of activity. Did you send out your direct mail but then not make follow-up calls for two months? Or, did you send out your direct mail pieces before qualifying your mailing list? If you haven’t followed the plan of your marketing strategy, a lack of success will be the result.

Customer Response. If you’ve identified that you have done your marketing activities and completed them in the right order, the next step is to revisit the responses you’ve received to each activity. Are you not hearing any response from customers or prospects? When you follow up with them, are they telling you that they don’t need your products/services? Are you not getting the opportunity to talk with any of them? In most cases, your customer and prospect responses will tell you exactly where your marketing is off-target. It could be your message and how you’re communicating, or it could be that you’re targeting the wrong audience.

Your Response to Customer Feedback. The final step in your evaluation is to assess how you have responded to the feedback you’ve received. A lot of companies plan exactly how they’re going to implement their marketing activities, and then they do it—blindly. Even when customers tell them that their message is wrong, they move forward with their campaign even though it’s not effective. Your company’s ability to react to customers and respond positively to their needs is critical to marketing success. If you’re receiving a lot of feedback suggesting changes, chances are that you already have the answers for making your marketing more effective. The key is to make those changes, and if you do not, your lack of sales will be the result.

Although there is no magic trick to turn around an ineffective marketing program, the bright side is that these problems are an easy fix: get back on track with your implementation as soon as possible.

Need help analyzing your marketing? 360 Business Consulting can help you understand where your efforts need to be focused to deliver results. Call us at 949.916.9120 for a free consultation, or click here to email us.