Evaluate Your Marketing Plan

Introduction
I cannot stress enough the importance of taking the time to evaluate your marketing plan. You not only make sure that everyone is on board to support your overall goals and objectives, but you also make sure that your spending is getting the results you want. By the way, you also spend less when you plan ahead!

What Does Your Marketing Plan Look Like?
Do you know if you have a marketing plan, who developed it and when? You should know how often it is evaluated, who oversees the plan and who administers the plan. Are you aware of what products/services your marketing plan covers? What audience does it serve? What does your marketing plan cost? Do you know whether or not it's effective? What type of return are you getting?

How Can You Affect Your Marketing Plan?
I started my message to you with quite a few questions. I notice that usually when the topic of a marketing plan comes up with our clients, they don't know who has responsibility for taking the time to develop one and getting concurrence on the activities and budget. You can affect your marketing plan by:

1. Developing it or revitalizing it
2. Communicating the plan to all involved parties
   
3. Implementing it
4. Monitoring it
   
5. Recommending change when change is needed
   
6. Making sure that changes are instituted and communicated
   
7. Documenting how it is more effective to have a plan than to not have a plan
8. Encouraging others to adopt it and work within it
9. Championing its vitality
10. Measuring the return

Understand Your Patterns
It helps if you understand whether your company's marketing activities are spur of the moment decisions or well-thought out plans of action. You need to get a grip on what you're doing as a company in relationship to your entire marketing campaign. Ask yourself: Would my actions have been different if I had planned them a few weeks or months ago?

Gain Control of Your Activities
You need to know what you are doing right now and what your plan looks like by individual product and service. You should be able to look at your plan by:

• Month/quarter
• Activities
• Costs
• Results
• Effectiveness

Evaluate Your Plan
Make a table with the following categories across the top:

• Product/Service
• Activities
• Costs
• Measurement
• Results

Grade each activity with a 1 or a 2 or a 3.

• 1 Great — Keep going
• 2 Good — Keep an eye on it
• 3 Fair — Change something or cancel

Summary
This brief look at evaluating your marketing plan should help you make strides in developing and revitalizing your marketing plan as well as ensuring that the results from your activities are effective and getting results that give your the return you need.

Will Your Marketing Be Affected by the Good Enough Revolution?

Not so long ago, about 181 million cheap, disposable cameras were selling in the US, compared with around 7 million digital cameras. Evaluation discovered that customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. Given the hassle it was to get film footage off cameras and onto a computer for editing and sharing, the videocam market was open to a cheaper, simpler video camera - the Flip Ultra. The camcorder captured relatively low-quality 640 X 480 footage at a time when the more high-end, high quality companies were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi def. The demand for cheap, fast, and simple, i.e. Good Enough, is increasing.

News comes from blogs, long-distance calls can be made on Skype, we can watch video on small computer screens rather than TV and many are moving to low-power netbook-computers that are just good enough to meet needs. Technology has increased the consumer and business appetite for flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. The term "high-quality" is changing. From medicine to the military, the rise of Good Enough is becoming rampant. We can even get more music into our computers at a manageable size with MP3 technology. The music business has changed.

Web tools are succeeding because they are Good Enough. Ease of use, continuous availability and low price are becoming more critical. Even the military has jumped on the bandwagon — consider the MQ-1 Predator with a top speed of 135 miles per hour. The ability to maintain a constant presence in the air is possible because the aircraft is cheap to build, can fly for more than 20 hours straight, doesn't require pilots who need sleep, food and bathroom breaks, and who might die if shot down. The Good Enough theory is being applied all over the place. Look at elawyering, virtual trade shows inhabited by avatars, and health care one-stop shops.

How might all of this work? The application of the Pareto principle. 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment might deliver 80 percent of the value to consumers. So I ask you, is your marketing being affected by the Good Enough Revolution? Are you sacrificing quality for speed of delivery? Information for this blog was excerpted from the September 2009 issue of WIRED, articled entitled The Good Enuf Rvlutn, starting on page 110. I recommend reading it in its entirety!!