Evaluation is a key marketing step that often gets skipped. Why? Sometimes, it’s because business owners don’t think about how they’ll measure success until the end of the program. (That’s too late.) Sometimes, businesses skip over evaluation because their marketing people don’t like math. (Wrong answer.) Most of the time, it’s because companies handle marketing on the ready, fire, aim model.
You’ll get marketing programs that perform most effectively if you figure out up front what will constitute success and how you’ll measure it. You should make sure that everyone involved help-s to identify the success criteria and buys into the final evaluation model. Make sure you are measuring something that can be directly tied to the marketing, such as the number of places a press release ran, the number of inquiries generated by an ad, the number of opt-in names generated by an online promotion.
Tip #30: Identify the evaluation criteria for each marketing activity. How will you know whether it worked? Does everyone involved agree on the criteria? You want to avoid the “Monday morning quarterback” syndrome—remember, hindsight has 20/20 vision.
I’ve shared 30 of my favorite marketing tips, but they’re not all of my favorite tips by far!
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Tags: business, evalution, marketing, PR, publicity, writing
