How to Evaluate your Marketing Efforts

For a successful year, a major component of your business’s success, you have to have a strong marketing strategy, attainable goals, realistic deadlines, and honest expectations.

2023 is a month away. And now is the time (if you haven’t already) to take a deep dive into your marketing strategy, whether or not that involves an increase in budget. Although, if you’re looking to cut overall business costs and considering pulling from the marketing budget, you might want to reconsider.

According to a 2022 CMO survey, marketing budgets will continue to rise and are the highest they’ve been in the past 10 years.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to assess and evaluate your marketing results. 

Assess + evaluate your Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 results

Although the year hasn’t quite wrapped up, now is the best time to assess what marketing strategies have worked and what haven’t in the last 10 months. Grab your marketing plan and let’s go through the list.

For digital marketing

Goal fulfillment

Overall, and in alignment with your goals, what social channels most closely fulfilled those goals? For example, did you increase the number of followers? Did you grow your engagement? Did you get more website visits or clicks? Did those call-to-actions produce a purchase of a product or service?

SEO + website optimization

When you search your business and related keywords, where does your business appear? Is it clear what you want your customers to do when they go to your website? How easy is it to use your site? Is contacting you easy? Is it easy to make a purchase? Are all links working and up to date with information? Optimizing your website is essential for search engines.

Ad success

Did you run any digital ads this past year? Which channels did you run them on? Social media? Google? How did they perform? Did they achieve your intended goal? What made one ad more successful than another? In regard to print, video, or radio advertising, how do you measure success? Did they reach your expectations?

Content calendar/strategy for social media and blog

As far as posting content, did you have a plan or did you just post randomly whatever came to mind that day or week? Did either process work well? Did you do it efficiently? Thoughtfully?
What posts performed better and on what channels? Why?

PR and media ops

Besides ads, did you have any additional exposure that could benefit your business? Did you have any media coverage for your business? Did you attend any industry events or shows? Did you join a rotary club or join any entrepreneur memberships? 

Now that you’ve evaluated the past year’s results. It’s time to plan and implement your marketing strategy. Read more about it here.