Welcome to topic 4, the final topic in this module – Evaluate Marketing Performance. This topic explores the methods used to evaluate marketing performance, including Marketing Performance Measurement, Marketing Performance Management, Marketing Return on Investment, and Return on Marketing Investment.
By the end of this topic, you will understand:
- How to assess business performance against business plan objectives
- How to address performance gaps
- How to analyse stakeholder response to improve targeting and outcomes
- The process required to determine changes in customer requirements
- The techniques needed to identify opportunities for improvement
Measuring the financial impact of marketing can be challenging. Evaluating marketing performance should be part of the usual planning and budgeting exercise. You can use the evaluation outcomes to determine what needs to be modified or improved in the marketing mix and assess whether the products and services meet customer needs. It is difficult to measure whether the marketing activities achieved the marketing goals you set during the planning stage.
You could measure goals by asking questions such as:
- Did the activities improve and enhance our brand awareness?
- Were customers informed and educated about the potential benefits of our products?
- Did we strengthen our stakeholder relationships?
Marketing metrics provide frameworks the marketing team can use to evaluate performance and support their marketing plans and strategies. Methods used by organisations to assess marketing performance include Marketing Performance Measurement, Marketing Performance Management, Marketing Return on Investment, and Return on Marketing Investment.
The success of your business can be improved by measuring the progress of projects, sprints or tasks concerning the overall business outcomes and goals. Measuring and recording business practice processes enable you to detect when things are not going in the right direction and evaluate business opportunities.
You must review your progress regularly to enable you to adjust your work before it is too late. Leaving the assessment of your business performance until six months or twelve months is too late. Identify the problem and ask relevant questions to assess why you are not achieving your goals.
Once you have identified the problem, you need to allocate resources to make your business grow. Conduct a gap analysis to determine what you need to do to achieve success. The gap analysis is a tool that will help you understand:
- The current situation or performance
- The ideal situation or potential
- What needs to be done to get from performance to potential (bridging the gap)
You need to document the gap analysis results, which are then used to inform decisions to improve the problem. There are different types of gap analysis elements to consider, as is evident in the following table:
| Performance (or strategy) gap | Product (or market gap) | Profit gap | Workforce gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual versus expected performance | Actual versus budgeted sales | Actual versus target profit | Actual versus available and qualified workforce |
| An analysis of the company goals looks at how far a company has come compared to completed plans. As a strategy gap, the gap represents a threat to future performance indicators. | A market gap analysis is proactive. It can be performed internally or externally. | Problems with profit forecasting might be related to planning or execution, such as shifting market trends or unforeseen conditions. | It can help make an informed decision regarding staffing and budgeting and align them to strategic and performance objectives. |
Further Reading
Visit Peterson, 2019 to read this article that explains how to use and process gap analysis and its benefits.
Your stakeholders have power and influence over the marketing strategy and plan. Stakeholders could be supporters of your project, or they could block your projects. A stakeholder analysis can improve the quality of your project.
There are three steps you can use when analysing your stakeholders.
- Identifying your stakeholders
- Prioritising your stakeholders according to their power over your work
- Understanding how they feel about your project.
Read the article Stakeholder Analysis: Winning Support for Your Projects.
This article explains why stakeholder analysis is important, four key benefits of a stakeholder-based approach and how to conduct a stakeholder analysis. The “Prioritise your Stakeholders” section describes how to use the Power/ Interest Grid in your stakeholder analysis.
Improvements are essential for businesses in a climate of competition, market rivalry and the global economy"Pierre Ventner, 2019
This quote, used earlier in Topic 3, by Pierre Ventner, suggests that opportunities for improvement should:
Drive innovation.
- Align with your business goals
- Deliver results
- Drive innovation
Customer requirements will change depending on several factors. What are some factors that contribute to customers changing their conditions? Just as a business needs to analyse customer needs when developing its marketing strategies and marketing plan, a company needs to continue assessing customer requirements changes. Look at the following infographic that highlights where customer needs are identified and where there are opportunities for improvement.
If strategies are unsuccessful or do not perform as well as expected, the business should implement a plan to assess the changes in customer requirements. This might include personal customer interviews, job mapping, observational interviews with customers, customer surveys, feedback and reviews from customers, analysis of the Net Promoter Score, as well as an assessment of current trends and what the competitors are experiencing.
Read Understanding Your Customer's Needs by Strategyn to download the ODI white paper and read the “Effective Customer Needs Analysis” article and “Capturing the Inputs into Innovation”.
Identifying opportunities for improvement to marketing campaigns is just as crucial for business growth as is planning the marketing campaign and strategies. Analysis of which systems are working and which are not achieving expected goals is essential to brainstorm the opportunities for improvement. Reassess, reprioritise and redistribute the marketing budget to the strategies that will succeed in the current circumstances. In an article written for business customers by the Commonwealth Bank, the article quotes Stephen Halmarick, the Chief Economist at Commonwealth Bank, as saying:
Accurate and timely economic data has become crucial to informing business decisions, while consumer and organisational data is driving new levels of personalisation, resilience and agility for businesses.Stephen Halmarick
The final word goes to the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. He said:
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it.” Will an outcome-driven approach enable a company to do that?Steve Jobs, 1997
This is the video of his speech.
