What You Don’t Know, Can Hurt Your Business

Marketing Strategy Evaluation is important because there’s no other way to truly measure how your marketing is performing if you don’t know how to evaluate it. Rather than make this a really long article, we’d rather focus on helping you understand what things can hurt you if you either ignore or overlook them, in relevance to your marketing strategies.

What You Don’t Know, Can Hurt Your Business

We are big fans of the saying “you don’t know what you don’t know.” We are all experts at some things, while we fall short of being a genius at others. Having the right basic knowledge can be the difference between being in the general knowledge of something versus the infamous “getting caught with your pants down.” Here we want to help you recognize what things you should have general know-how of, vs. wearing no slacks.

Marketing Strategy Evaluation

This is important to have in business, even if you’re hiring someone to do the bulk of your marketing for you. Relationships fracture, people retire, companies get bought and sold, growth can be unanticipated, employees can quit unexpectedly. No matter what happens, you don’t want to have marketing that’s completely unknown to you and your team. Marketing strategy evaluation begins with determining who will be responsible for what. If you’re working with a 3rd party company, like us, or you have a team internally, or maybe both, knowing who’s responsible for what will help you hold accountability. If results either cannot be measured or are performing poorly, strategies need to be revamped.

Things To Consider

You wouldn’t ever walk into a meeting blindfolded. You’d never send a blind contractor to inspect a job. You probably can’t imagine buying a car if you couldn’t see a thing. The same is true for marketing your business. Don’t market blind.

Know where you need to go to get an idea of how your efforts are doing. Ask yourself a few questions about your marketing strategy:

• Do I know how to look at my insights on social media?
• Do I have access to Google Analytics for my website?
• What is our marketing budget and where is it being invested?

These are 3 basic questions that are important to have a clear answer to. Even if the answer is “yes, I can get there but I’m unclear what it all means” it’s still a far better situation than having no idea at all. Are these things your responsibility or someone else’s? Regardless, you should be able to at least ‘sort of’ know the answer to all three. Marketing strategy evaluation requires you to never be ‘blind’ to your marketing. Always, always, always have a general idea, or better.

Helpful Suggestions

Consider having a document for yourself that tells you where your marketing budget is going. It is likely that you have multiple channels and various efforts for each so keeping track of everything will at least help you determine what to look at for either expanding a budget or reducing a budget, depending on your business and its growth. The more you know, the more you can effectively strategize where more, or less, efforts should be going.

If we were to do a consultation with you, or your new marketing director was discussing this with you, the more you know the better we can strategize effective methods to improve or revamp your marketing. If the honest answer is that we’re all staring into a black hole together, sometimes the only option is to approach it like we’re starting from scratch. The idea is that it could cost you a lot more down the road and you may have to reinvent the wheel or fix what’s not broken. By having just mild knowledge of your marketing, the efforts to improve it will be far more effective.

It’s Never Perfect

Your marketing strategy evaluation would be perfect, in a perfect world, if you knew all of the expenses, efforts, and tracked results. Perfection doesn’t always happen, we know that. Just knowing your efforts and their related expenses can help us restructure your efforts even without knowing what results you’re seeing. We recommend keeping track of your marketing expenditures in a database or in your project management software application. If you don’t have anything, you can download this Marketing Budget WorkBook that we made to help you get started. You can adjust it as you need, of course.