Everything in business is an ongoing experiment. There are no fixed points of completion because there’s always a new goal to achieve, an obstacle to overcome or environmental change to which the business must adjust. As a result, marketing plans should always be fluid and ready to adapt.
In this article, we will discuss all the factors that you can use to evaluate whether or not your marketing plan is a success. We will discuss five metrics that you can track to get a clear understanding of how well your marketing plan is performing.
Sales Performance
The performance of your sales in response to your marketing plan is probably the most straightforward metric to track and the one most indicative of the marketing plan’s effectiveness. If there is a noticeable and sustained growth in sales volume, that is a positive sign. If sales are stagnated or shrinking, there may be a need to troubleshoot.
In a business that also has a sales team, the volume, quality and conversion rate of leads are all data points that can give a granular view of a marketing campaign’s impact on sales performance. Comparing historical data with data tracked during the campaign can be used to infer the amount of growth that can be attributed to the campaign.
Cost of Acquisition
Cost of acquisition or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is a valuable metric for marketers. As the name suggests, it is a metric that measures the total cost of getting one paying customer during a campaign. It is calculated by dividing the total campaign cost by the number of conversions generated and is a vital measurement of a campaign’s success.
It is essential to track the CPA for each product because reducing the CPA should be a key goal in any marketing plan. Measuring the CPA enables the business to have a clear understanding of the marketing budget required to achieve the business’ goals.
When combined with other metrics, CPA is a potent metric. The customer lifetime value (CLTV) is the total revenue the business can expect from a single customer. The relationship between the CPA and CLTV can help understand whether or not the amount being invested in acquiring customers (i.e. the marketing budget) is sufficient or excessive. Spending too little to reach customers who have high CLTV can result in poor marketing campaign performance while spending too much on customers with a low CLTV can result in low or even negative ROI. Knowing both of these metrics can help diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems during a campaign.
Return on investment
The budget for a marketing campaign is an investment that, like all other investments, must yield tangible profits. The return on investment (ROI) for a marketing campaign is calculated by taking the growth in sales, subtracting the cost of marketing and dividing the result by the marketing cost to get a percentage value.
Pre-campaign revenue should be tracked for at least three months to get the best results, then compared to the following three month period during which the campaign is being carried out. Using extended periods will enable you to gather more data which gives more accurate results.
ROI can be a good indicator of how well a marketing plan is working, how much revenue is being generated by the campaign and how efficiently it is running. There may be considerable growth in sales that can be attributed to the campaigns running under a marketing plan, but if the marketing budget is bloated and isn’t being used effectively, the actual ROI might be low, or the business may even register losses.
Competitor Reactions
Unlike the first three metrics, which are quantitative in nature, competitor reaction is more qualitative and can take a variety of forms. How your competitors act in the market in response to your campaigns is a strong indicator of your marketing plan’s success or failure.
When competitors try to replicate your campaigns, it implies your efforts are yielding results. Suppose your competitors are either seeing your success negatively impact their sales volumes or are anticipating a growth in your products’ sales to their detriment. In that case, they may launch counter-campaigns to either capitalise on your success or slow your growth. During this period, it is essential to evaluate your campaign and identify your success factors so you can protect them and keep your competitors from capturing lightning in a bottle the way you did.
Competitors can also ignore your efforts. This could be a cause for concern if your competitors do not see any impact from your campaigns. If this occurs, it is probably a good idea to evaluate the campaign, keeping an eye on the quantitative data you gathered and checking the campaign’s alignment with your marketing plan’s goals.
Consumer Feedback
Customers, being the people to whom you are serving your marketing campaigns, are an excellent resource for measuring your marketing plan’s success and effectiveness. Depending on the type of campaigns you execute, there are a variety of ways to collect data about customer response to your campaigns.
The easiest way to gauge customer to response is just to ask them. Surveys are powerful tools for collecting product and campaign-specific data directly from customers. Alternatively, the marketing team can record the data from observation. The number of people visiting the campaign site, their reactions to the campaign and any questions they ask are all indicative of how effective the campaign is, which translates to how effective the marketing plan itself is.
Conclusion
A marketing plan’s success may have quantitative components, but as a business function whose purpose is inherently qualitative, precision may not be particularly easy to achieve. Having clear goals, being able to measure the marketing plan’s impact on other business functions, and most importantly, having a consumer-centric approach to measuring marketing success all go a long way to building brand awareness and generating interest and loyalty in your products. Ultimately, the most valuable result you can get from a marketing plan, and the real marker of success is a growth in the number of people genuinely delighted by and loyal to your brand and products.
If you are working on a winning marketing plan and need a field marketing agency to bring your brand activations and field campaign ideas to life, please get in touch. We would be happy to talk to you about running field marketing campaigns that truly resonate with your consumers.