Are You Ready to Evaluate 2010

 Evaluating 2010? Don't Just Follow the Revenues!
Connecting the Dots is as Important as Adding Up the Spreadsheet

It's that time of year when we pull out the spreadsheets to figure out if we're going to make our financial goals this year, and at the same time, develop our strategy for next year.

And while it's true that numbers don't lie, they don't always tell you the whole truth, either. They may answer the basic question of whether you made more revenue than last year, but they don't answer the broader questions of why or why not. In doing your year-end analysis, I'm sure part of your evaluation will focus on the effectiveness of your marketing program.

To help you determine the course you chart for the coming year, my recommendation is to look at all the marketing data you've collected, almost like dots on a page and ask yourself if you were able to connect them all.

What dots, you ask? Well, everyone has to answer that for themselves, but here are the steps to figure out what they are:

Your Message: Making your numbers is usually the result of you getting your message out to the right people, so you can maximize your sales. If you didn't make your sales projections, now is a good time to analyze that message. Why didn't it resonate with your potential customers? Was your message too "inside" your industry, making it difficult for others to receive? Or was it that you tried to water your message down so much for the masses that it ceased to have any relevance at all. Messaging is one part art, one part science, and your end result should straddle the edge between appealing to everyone and appealing specifically to your potential customers.
 
Your Customer: It's not enough just to garner customers; you need to know who they are so you can focus your efforts on people who fit that profile. One of our clients, Jaynie Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage from Doubleday, (www.smartadvantage.com/), polled 3,000 CEOs to find out if they understood their customer base. Less than 5 percent accurately identified the profile of their primary customers. So, as you review this past year, look back in the files and take a look at who your best customers were and why.
 
Your Tactics: If you missed your projections, don't automatically fault your marketing strategy and your target audience. Don't be afraid to examine your tactics as well. While we don't advise our clients to avoid advertising, we also don't recommend a heavy concentration of it to the exclusion of other tactics either. The key thing is to balance your efforts across different forms of advertising and public relations, so that your different tactics will feed off each other. If you did make your goals, take a look at the tactics you used and see if you can determine which ones were more effective. Next year, you can redistribute your marketing resources to emphasize the tactics that worked best.
 
Your Web site: The Internet is taking on an essential role in just about every facet of communication, marketing and sales. Don't just examine your outreach, but also examine your website as a point of sale. If you didn't close as many customers as you wanted, take a look at the amount of traffic coming in and the number of visitors who turned into customers. The comparison of those figures is your "conversion rate," or the percentage of visitors who wound up making a "buy" decision after reaching your Web site. If the figure is less than one percent, then chances are something isn't clicking (no pun intended) between your customers and your Web site, and it's time to make some changes.
 
Your Outflow: One of the principles that I use faithfully in my business is the relationship between outflow and inflow. Outflow basically represents how much I reach out to my customer base via emails, articles in the press, columns that I email to my newsletter subscribers and social networking. Inflow is simply the response I get back. Outflow produces inflow! It's this one important principle that has contributed greatly to the success of my business. The corollary is simple, the more I reach out, the more I get back.
And that's what I mean by connecting the dots. You, your message, your customers, your potential customers and your business goals are all just dots on a page. Your marketing program is the line that SHOULD, in a perfect world, connect them all together. Whether you're an author trying to sell books or a company trying to increase sales - or an entrepreneur trying to compete in a crowded market - all of these principles can easily and directly apply to how you evaluate your marketing results for the year as you plan for 2011 and beyond.


Warm regards,
Marsha Friedman
CEO EMSI Public Relations