Your Guide to Your Annual Marketing Evaluation
At McCauley Marketing Services, one of our most core guiding principles is that your marketing strategy is an ever-changing project. There’s no singular perfect strategy for any business – your audience is made up of living and changing people, so your marketing strategy must constantly adapt to appeal to them and their demographic. An instrumental way to make sure you’re adapting your marketing in the right way is with an annual evaluation of your successes and where you could have done better.
Where do you begin with your annual marketing evaluation? While it’s a complex process that we walk through with our clients, there are a few highlights to make sure you cover.
- Start with the Big Picture
Before you dig into the nitty-gritty of your marketing data, you need to get a visual of your business as a whole. After all, the purpose of marketing is to grow and strengthen your business financially, so you need to have a picture of your financial health.
Look at your overall revenue as well as your sales numbers for specific services or products. Calculate your patient retention or customer retention rate for the year, and look at the number of new patients you brought in during the year. Consider also the average spend from each patient or customer.
There are many factors that affect this data, of course, so these numbers alone won’t tell you the complete picture about the success of your marketing. But it gives you an important reference to consider alongside all your marketing data.
- Cover the Basic Numbers
In marketing strategy assessments, the one basic figure you need to know is your return on investment. There is much more data to analyze, of course, but your overall ROI gives you a place to begin. Along with your total ROI for your entire marketing budget, you should calculate your ROI for each campaign you performed throughout the year.
Find the areas where you were strong and the areas where you may have missed. Was it the campaign itself that performed poorly, or was the problem that the customer or patient received poor service? Or was something else at play? Finding these issues is vital to your success.
- Consider All Campaigns and Marketing Avenues
Many businesses look at their marketing for the year in terms of campaigns: a campaign for a specific service or a particular event, for example. While it’s important to see which campaigns were most successful, you also need to compare your marketing avenues to each other.
For example, how profitable was your pay-per-click advertising or your magazine advertising this year? How successful was your email marketing across all campaigns, and your social media marketing, for instance? For campaigns as well as marketing avenues, you need to know what worked and what didn’t.
- Assess Your Customer or Patient Base
Another part of gauging your success is to look not just at revenues and profits but at people. Take a close look at your customer base or patient base to see who you’re reaching with your marketing (and who you aren’t reaching).
What age ranges, cities of residence, ethnic groups, and genders have grown in your patient base this year? Which ones have shrunk? Which groups or demographics are largely missing from your patient base? This data will show you who your marketing has been reaching successfully and who you’re missing, along with your overall patient or customer retention. It will also help you determine what kinds of changes need to be made in order to be as successful as possible.
Putting Your Annual Marketing Evaluation to Use
The four highlights above are only a start to your annual marketing analysis, but once you’ve taken the time to gather, calculate, and evaluate all that data, the work is only beginning. This information should be the cornerstone of your marketing strategy for the next year so you can design your budget and campaigns around what has worked or the areas you need to improve.
Our team at McCauley Marketing Services has the specialized experience to help you evaluate where your marketing has taken you and to design a well-informed strategy to help your business grow in the future. But remember, every marketing strategy needs shifts and tweaks regularly to keep it working. To learn more, call our marketing specialists today. Follow us as well on Facebook and Instagram for more marketing tips.