Eric Dalius provides tips for evaluating marketing strategies

As you should keep an eye on the monetary returns from your marketing efforts, it is equally important to understand how your marketing strategies are performing.  Scrutinizing the performance of various business operations is critical to judge the business efficiency and understand what is working and what needs some change or improvement, explains Eric Dalius. Thus, evaluating your marketing strategies is the key to business success by eliminating ineffective strategies to reinforce your business plan by making necessary changes for improvement.

Regular scrutiny of your marketing plan helps weed out campaigns that are not helping to achieve the marketing target. However, to monitor the performance of your marketing strategies, you must use some mechanisms, as discussed in this article.

Check the sales figure to identify changes, suggests Eric Dalius

Increasing sales is the objective of most marketing efforts because it translates into more profits in most cases. Use the sales figures to identify the impact of your marketing strategies on customer behavior. Monitor a marketing campaign closely right from the time of roll out up to 6 months and keep track of the long-term response that helps to monitor delayed effects.

Use a Questionnaire

Talking directly to customers is the best way to judge the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. The most effective technique to elicit the proper response from customers is to share a questionnaire with them. By talking to some of your long-time customers, you can check how well you promote new services or features. Sending out surveys at random helps gauge the impact of a marketing campaign on customer perception and reveals how familiar they are with your company. To understand how effective your marketing strategy is in roping in new customers, ask them how they reached your business.

Monitor the progress

Marketing is like a pillar of your business as it helps achieve the overall business goals. By monitoring the progress of marketing, you get some hints about the general business progress.  Periodically evaluate each business goal, and if you find some slow progress in attaining some of the goals, it could be that your marketing strategy linked to it needs revamp or, if found ineffective, must be scrapped.

Compare how your strategy fares with those of your competitors

Assuming that your strategies are similar to those of your competitors, it is helpful to compare these to identify differences in quality, frequency, response, and content. Note the extent of spread of the advertisements of your competitors by figuring out the number of places it appears, the number of followers they have on the social media, the impact of their marketing campaign on the profits, and how they have modified their marketing strategies.

Work out the return on investment

It is not enough for the marketing strategies to help realize the business goals, but it is crucial to ensure that these strategies are sustainable.  It means that there must be cost-effective in the long run.  Take into account the man-hours devoted to a campaign and the cost incurred to sustain it. Then, plot the cost against the profit generated from the campaign to work out the ROI.

If there is no improvement in profit, the campaign is not worth pursuing.