Businesss in MaineToday.com | Maine Media & Marketing

January 2, 2000

MAINE MEDIA & MARKETING
Reviewing your marketing efforts

by KIMBERLY MCCALL

Recently in MAINE MARKETING & MEDIA:
Making it in Maine: Advice from successful Maine entrepreneurs (3.24.00)
When advertising fails to sell (3.2.00)
Designing and copywriting for effective print advertising (1.2.00)

Complete index

Reviewing your marketing efforts is work, but it can be very gratifying work. Now is the time for you to make decisions about what was effective, what wasn't, what might have been effective if you'd had the time, and your direction for 2000. And if you've never had a marketing plan before, it's not too late to put pen to paper. I know it sounds time-consuming, but going through the exercise of creating a plan and budget is a low-cost way to assess your success to date and plan for all your future success. Here are a few tips for assessing and updating your plan:

What worked? Did you host an event, sponsor a charity, launch a PR campaign, volunteer on a board? What was the highlight of your year? What brought you to that success? Can you duplicate it? Can you quantify what worked, i.e. the return on your investment? Did a 15% increase in advertising lead to a 25% increase in sales? Did you track your investments well enough to judge what was effective? This is the time to make adjustments to your media, advertising and PR budget. Line up the costs with the results and determine what marketing you will stick with and what you will cut. For those strategies that worked especially well, you may want to put more money toward them in 2000, and ditch anything that didn't pull results. HOWEVER, make sure you gave each strategy enough time so you can reasonably evaluate it. For example, if you did radio two weeks out of the year and it 'didn't work,' know that you did not give it enough of a run to fairly evaluate it.

What didn't work? If an idea or campaign failed, do you have a good handle on why? Did you select the wrong media, or underfund your advertising? Was your message right for your audience? Did you start marketing efforts and abandon them before they had a chance to work? Did you get bogged down in the details of running a business and forget the big picture? Did you forgo initiatives because you didn't have the time to implement them yourself? Do you have a clear idea of how much your time is worth, and when it makes sense to outsource tasks? Many small business owners try to be all things to all people, all the time. While this is understandable, it can also be deadly to a business. You need to do what you do best, and outsource tasks that aren't your forte to specialists.

If you've never created a plan before, now's a good time to start. Your plan does not need to be a James Michener-sized document to be effective. And if the work is daunting to you, start small: get your goals down on paper, then list ways to get to those goals. Sketch out your plans month-by-month, and assign budget numbers to each month for advertising and PR. Do your homework well, and stick with your marketing investments for one year to truly judge their efficacy.

Kimberly McCall is the president of McCallMedia & Marketing, Inc., a marketing, public relations and business communications company in Freeport, Maine. She is the monthly marketing columnist for Entrepreneur's Start-ups magazine, and an inc.com contributor. You may reach her at: Kimberly@MarketingAngel.com. Web site: www.MarketingAngel.com.

To top of page