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!!

Are Working Half Days Your Key to Marketing Success?

Not too long ago, I heard about a man who attributed his career success to working half days on a consistent basis over the course of many years. I was amazed. Working half days and achieving something of magnitude didn’t seem possible. I read on with curiosity. I assumed that certainly this man wasn’t working in a demanding business environment, and most certainly this man wasn’t working in a marketing department. Indeed, his claim to fame was working half days, and he said, you even have a choice of when you want to work. You can work the first twelve hours of a day or the second twelve hours of a day. His definition of working a half day was different than most of ours!

My bubble was burst. I thought for sure I was going to discover a secret. But sure enough, the truth as we know it was as bright as day. What you get out of just about anything you do depends upon what you put into it. Every once in a while you get a bonus, but for the most part, hard work does pay off. So putting that into perspective, we better understand that when our efforts are well planned, and expertly executed, we can expect to achieve our desired results.

Anyone involved in marketing knows that just about everything we do requires advance planning, a watchful eye, and careful implementation. We develop a camaraderie with others in marketing and share the experiences of having a brainstorm in the middle of the night, or feeling the need to pull over on the side of the road to capture a brilliant idea on paper, or being overtaken with a compelling drive to work until the wee hours of the night just for the sheer satisfaction of accomplishing a goal, completing a project, or launching a campaign successfully. As soon as one project is over, another one is nipping at our heels. We graciously and enthusiastically welcome the demanding projects as a challenge.

So, given that our workday is filled with thinking, planning, implementing, measuring, observing, calculating, and launching, we need to identify guidelines for how a half day work schedule can be best maximized. Your half day can be defined as an 8, 10, or 12 hour day.

Understand objectives. Know what you have to accomplish, and get a good solid feel for your audience to help ensure receptivity. Identify whether your actions are based on a spur of the moment idea or a well thought out plan of action. Evaluate what you’re doing in relationship to your entire marketing campaign. Would your actions have been different if you planned them a few weeks or months ago?

Know your resources. Resources include employees, suppliers, subcontractors and an available budget. Plan for their use in the most time-effective and cost-efficient way possible. Estimate the time and cost of everything you do. Understand your labor costs in relationship to the work that’s being done. Perform the work at hand in the most productive manner possible keeping quality at the forefront of all you do.

Identify your options. Once you have an idea, look at your alternatives from each perspective: development, production, and delivery. If you have identified at least three different ways of accomplishing what you’re setting out to do, you have taken the time to estimate each, you have evaluated which is the best for the situation, then you have probably made a very good decision.

Get added value wherever possible. Use the experience and knowledge of your suppliers and colleagues. Involve them in the planning stage so that they understand what you are doing. Ask for input and feedback. Being respectful of your suppliers’ and colleagues’ input will benefit you both in the short run and in the long run. They should be treated, and nurtured as partners.

Evaluate the results of your actions. Be objective and optimistic that you will achieve your desired results. If you do, then understand what worked. If you don’t get your results, then try to understand what could have been done differently. How could you have better assured that you got your desired results? Don’t be defensive about your findings. Learn from them and share what you learned with others.

Although we should be looking toward the future one day at a time, will we be like the man who attributes his career success to working half days, albeit 12 hour days, on a consistent basis over the course of many years? Will we encourage others to work the first or second twelve hours? Will we believe in the length of a work day, or the quality of the work day? How can we become more efficient with the reasonable or lengthy hours we commit to our jobs? How can we ensure that we get quality results the first time we launch a campaign? How can we tell the difference between a productive workday and an unproductive workday when we have so much to do? Will we be able to pass that valuable information along to our employees? Will we be a slave driver to the impossible or an influencing energizer with bright ideas, and well thought out plans of action that are expertly executed with successful results each and every time? Choose wisely.