Questions for Evaluating your Marketing Results

October is here.  Like it or not, we’re now into the fourth quarter of 2013 and with that comes the challenge of ensuring the year ends as well as you envisioned it back in January.  While everyone focuses on either closing sales or building new business, forward thinking business pros will take this opportunity to look back and see what’s been done and evaluate how effective it has been.

Here are a few probing questions for different areas of your business.  You don’t need to answer all of them, but as you do, you’ll gain insight into your marketing efforts that you might not have otherwise.

Email Marketing

• How many email campaigns did you send in the last 9 months?
• Which campaigns resulted in sales?
• Which campaigns resulted in unsubscribes?
• Has your engagement become stagnant? (watch your ‘Opens’ and ‘Clicks’ over time)
• How much has your list grown over that time period?  What sources have driven that growth?

What are the pros and cons of email marketing?

Website Analytics

• Has traffic grown or shrunk over the past 9 months?
• What has been your most profitable traffic source?
• Have you been publishing content regularly?  Which posts are people most interested in?
• Where are people leaving your site?  Do you know why?

Find out how you can get your business listed in the Google local pack.

Social Conversations

• What has been the most significant news in your industry this year?
• How have you been engaged in those conversations?
• How have those conversations impacted your bottom line (or fanbase, or subscriber list, etc)?
• How have the needs of your customers changed this year?
• What are you doing to meet those changing needs?

Sales

• What sales patterns have you observed over the past 9 months?
• Have the actual sales lined up with your projects?  Where did it deviate? Why?
• What new customers have presented unforeseen challenges and are holding your business back?
• Which customers are your best new customers?
• Why did those “best new customers” choose to do business with you?
• What can you do to close more business with that ideal customer?

Why should you invest in a digital marketing strategy?

 Takeaways

• What specific marketing initiative didn’t work well over the past 9 months?
• What was the one, most productive marketing activity from that same time period?
• List 3-5 high-impact, minimal-effort marketing tasks that could help you finish 2013 strong.

Is this list helpful? What’s on your checklist? Let us know!  Not sure what some of these things mean or how to proceed? Get in touch – we’d be more than happy to help guide you to an exceptional fourth quarter.

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