You don't have to wait until your marketing plan is fully executed before you measure its effectiveness. By building controls into your plan, you can determine whether your marketing strategy is working long before your marketing is complete. In creating your marketing plan, spend some time creating controls and assigning someone to be in charge of them.
In the control phase of your marketing plan, you must designate the standards you will use to measure your marketing effectiveness. These may include a designated percentage increase in sales, an improvement in cash flow, a percentage increase in the size of your email contact list and an increase in shipped orders, to give a few examples. The person designated to establish these standards should have input when you are creating your marketing plan so that both you and the control manager know exactly how you will measure marketing performance.
Advertisement Article continues below this adPart of the control process involves making sure marketing efforts are producing results at an acceptable pace. When building controls into your plan, create monthly or quarterly checklists of elements your control manager should look for. These checklists may include improved customer responses on surveys, increased distribution of your product or service and improved brand recognition as measured by surveys. These monthly checklists show you whether you're on the right path early in the marketing process.
You can have improved responses without improving sales. If all you want is more customer awareness of your plan, improved responses may be enough for you. State explicitly in your plan how this control will work. For example, you may write, "We will achieve a 30 percent increase in positive responses." However, if you are after sales, your control statement should say so. You may say, "We will see a 50 percent increase in sales by the end of our marketing initiative and a 15 percent increase in sales each quarter." Stating the specific element you want to control will help you measure its success.
Advertisement Article continues below this adIt's important to track whether the improvements you see relate to the standards you set. You may have an increase in sales that have nothing to do with your marketing efforts, for example. A competitor may have gone out of business or you may have unwittingly under-priced your product compared to a similar product. Happy accidents are not controls. Make sure that the standards you establish in your marketing plan are used to measure the results. This will tell you how good your company is at planning your marketing.