Marketing & Sales

Are You Meeting Your Marketing Goals?

Learn how to evaluate your marketing strategy and improve it to reach your goals.

Building a successful start-up or home business that lacks a clear goal is, quite simply, wishful thinking! Since you won't be able to assess the impact or value of your efforts, you won’t know if your strategy is working for you. Marketing goals serve as a source of clarity, direction, and vision. They are what lead to success for you, your department, and the company as a whole, whether personal or commercial. 

The blueprints for your company's sales strategy are your marketing plans. They spell out the details of what to expect in the coming year, but they may be susceptible to change or evaluation according to market changes. Marketing should not be set in action and then forgotten about; it should be reviewed, assessed, and altered on a regular basis to meet the demands of the business and the desires of the consumer. 

What is marketing strategy evaluation?

The full, systematic examination and interpretation of the internal and external corporate marketing environment, as well as its goals, objectives, and strategies, is referred to as marketing evaluation.  

Understanding how to determine whether your marketing strategy is producing the greatest potential results will save you time and money, while also ensuring success.

Every marketing strategy plan includes objectives that the team will utilize to assess the campaign's performance. Meeting quotas, enhancing audience engagement, and improving key performance indicators are just a few of the objectives. However, they all have the same goal in mind: to raise brand awareness, increase revenue, and expand the company.     

A few marketing goals you can consider are :

  1. Boost brand awareness:

Every marketing professional aims to raise brand awareness so that when a customer wants the service or product your firm provides, they think of you first. An individual's familiarity with a product's name, image, and features is referred to as brand awareness. Customers are more likely to be repeat customers, support your purpose, and share marketing content if they perceive your brand as a reliable resource or producer. 

Every brand has a personality, a human voice that is shaped by the tone you use, the platforms you use, and the subjects or topics you discuss. If you want to raise brand awareness, you should start by determining what that personality is and how that voice sounds.

  • Tell a story: Consumers engage with brands with which they identify, and storytelling is a great technique for doing so. Consider your brand's origin story and what gives it humanity when you write your story.
  • Consider where your ideal customers spend the majority of their time: On the internet, this could resemble a certain social media platform such as Instagram or TikTok. It could also be a particular medium, such as email or podcasts. You want to go where your target audience is.
  • Share and interact with your audience regularly: Once you've figured out what story you want to tell and where your audience is, all that's left is to interact with them. Posting intriguing information on social media, maintaining a blog, or guest blogging to give business insights are all examples of this.

  1. Generating high-quality leads:

Your sales team relies on a steady flow of leads to nurture and convert into new clients. Individuals that have the potential to become new consumers are considered high-quality leads. 

Once you've identified the type of lead most likely to become a client, you'll want to acquire their contact information so that the marketing or sales department may send them information and promotions about the company's products or services. Website forms and pop-up dialogues are two ways to create leads. To track and connect marketing campaigns with sales, use revenue attribution.

Assessing the results of your marketing activities to discover which individuals become customers is one way to measure the success of your lead generation, and in turn, your marketing goal.

  1. Establish Industry Expertise:

Whatever business you work in, being acknowledged as an expert in your field is essential for demonstrating a high degree of expertise and trustworthiness. Thought leadership, not to be confused with brand awareness, refers to customers identifying your brand — and the people who work for it — as among the best and most trustworthy in the industry. Brand awareness, on the other hand, is more concerned with ensuring that your brand and its products/services are seen and acknowledged. 

There are several approaches to establishing and maintaining thought leadership. Producing, publishing, and distributing content that inspires your target audience and addresses their pain areas is one of these strategies.

Furthermore, you can develop thought leadership by :

  • Through webinars and panel discussions and collaborating with other industry leaders.
  • Having your content appear on their favorite websites, such as through guest blogs or guest posts
  • Track webinar or guest blog traffic and include CTAs with your material to evaluate the performance of your thought leadership approach.

So how can you evaluate your marketing goals and strategy? 

To assess your marketing strategy plan and understand if you’ve reached your goals, here are some key indicators to look out for:

  1.  Return on Investment

When it comes to marketing or any other business expense, the return on investment is always a key worry. The goal is to determine whether the money you invested in your marketing strategy paid off. You must compare the amount spent on each campaign to the number of sales generated by that campaign. You can calculate an overall score, but a more detailed breakdown of each marketing initiative will reveal which initiatives were successful and which were not. All of the other indications can aid in evaluating effectiveness, but to analyze efficiency, you must compare the amount spent to the benefit received. In the end, the company must generate a profit in order to survive.

Even if you think you're having a good return on investment, you might be able to improve it by modifying or eliminating ineffective techniques. When done correctly, marketing converts leads into clients. This conversion process should result in a profit that can be calculated. Examine all aspects of your marketing strategy to see which ones are financially viable. You can calculate an overall measurement, but a more detailed breakdown by marketing endeavor will reveal which efforts were most successful. Continue with the efforts that are working and improve the ones that aren't. 

  1. Customer Reactions and Responses

Customer response, in all of its forms, can assist you in determining the types of responses your marketing elicits. Online and in-person surveys, general customer service reviews, and online commentary can all tell what your customers think about your marketing and which efforts are most effective. Simple queries like "How did you hear about our seasonal sale?" might reveal which campaigns are resonating with customers and which audience segments are buying.

Using a questionnaire to talk directly to customers is a simple and inexpensive way to evaluate the performance of a marketing strategy. Talk to customers who have been using your products or services for a long time to see how successfully you are promoting new services to them. Send out questionnaires to a random sample of your target demographic to determine how familiar they are with your brand and to further assess how a marketing effort has changed customer perception. Gain an understanding of which of your marketing methods is the most persuasive by asking new consumers how they heard about you.

  1. Analyzing Sales Data

The simplest and quickest approach to see if your strategy is working is to look at the data. Salespeople can serve as an excellent barometer for determining marketing effectiveness. To assess whether your efforts are effective, ask for their feedback. If the feedback is overwhelmingly negative, or if consumers aren't responding, you should rethink your strategy and better serve the demands of your sales team to ensure growth.

Check your sales conversion rate as well. The best method here is to review your prior data and see if your lead-to-customer conversion rate has increased. Keep in mind that different methods have varying sales cycles. Before a brand-building endeavor delivers a discernible profit, it usually necessitates a long-term investment. Sales promotions, on the other hand, can provide minor returns more quickly. Effective sales conversion is a key element of attaining growth, so instead of focusing solely on generating leads, make sure you evaluate your performance at closing the purchase. 

  1. Cost-Per-Acquisition

While key performance indicators are crucial in any well-run operation, Marketing CPA is the gold standard for measuring the true return on investment. It doesn't matter how well the market or customers respond; if the marketing campaign doesn't generate revenue, it's a failure. 

It's crucial to keep track of each product's previous CPA. If market conditions stay unchanged in the new period, your marketing team's goal should be to lower the marketing CPA. This statistic can be used to determine the budget required to meet corporate objectives, as well as an efficient way to handle the complex planning process with the finance department. The marketing CPA measure is more important if you're seeking outside investors for your business.

 

Investors care deeply about your CPA. They can define how profitable your  firm is by comparing the amount of profit you make in comparison to your  cost of acquisition. Investors are more interested in the existing relationship than in promises made in the future. They use it to maximize their investment returns. In other words, lowering the marketing CPA enhances the company's profit margin. 

  1. Branding

Is your organization in the process of redefining itself? Is that reflected in your brand's image? Because your brand is the face of your company, it's critical to tie together the who, what, and why of your marketing plan under your brand. Is your company's image on point? People notice if you appear to be out of date these days. Is it clear what you're trying to portray through branding activities?

Asking these questions will help you understand if your brand strategy is working. A solid brand strategy increases reliability, which in turn leads to people trusting and buying from your brand. Checking your strategies helps you understand your reach and whether you have hit a certain brand goal.

Tips to help you fine-tune your strategy:

Remember that your marketing strategy is the surefire means to reach people. With the dynamism of market trends, it becomes important to keep an eye out for whether a certain strategy is working out for your firm. If you think it's time for a revamp, consider these tips to improve your marketing strategy plan.

 

  • Compare yourself to your competitors’ strategies: 

If you and your competitors are using similar techniques, you can compare them to see if there are any differences in frequency, quality, content, or response. Take note of how many different places your competitors' ads appear, how many social media followers they have, how their earnings changed following a campaign, and how they've adjusted their other marketing techniques. 

  • Keep track of your Target Consumers:

Has your target market shifted since you first identified it? Trends, society, technology, and the economy all evolve over time, so the audience you first targeted may no longer be the appropriate fit for your business. 

What are the trends you're seeing in the industry? Evaluation is an excellent time to sit down with your staff and find out what dynamic shits they're seeing. Your target profile has most likely changed without you even being aware of it. 

  • Market Research is essential:

Market research is frequently disregarded, but it is one of the most crucial aspects of rethinking your marketing plan. Asking your customers about how your business is doing is the best approach to find out. Client surveys and focus groups are one approach to see if your marketing plan is still giving the greatest outcomes for your customers.  

What Next?

Here are a few takeaways to remember, while evaluating your marketing goals and your marketing strategy plan:  

  • Are the objectives you set for your company the same objectives you are attempting to attain now?
  • Examine your target demographic to check if they are still the right fit for your company.
  • Obtain information directly from your clients by conducting market research and analysis.
  • Is your company's brand still representative of how you wish to be perceived?
  • Examine the raw figures to discover if you're getting the profit your business deserves. 

Now that you are aware of what marketing goals are and how to evaluate your marketing strategy plan, consider connecting with the right solution providers to help improve your marketing strategy plans. Consider platforms like Hoist, especially if you would like to explore the possibility of owning a painting company. We can help you with everything necessary to start, run, and grow your business.

Get ahead of the competition.

Join the 14,000+ entrepreneur growing their business with Hoist's guidance.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Welcome

We're Hoist. We help entrepreneurs successfully run and grow painting businesses. Learn about how to build your company by following along on Instagram and Linkedin.

More for You