How Effective is Your Marketing Plan?

It’s officially fall, so many marketers are in the middle of another year of planning. Unless, of course, you’re ahead of the game – in which case, congratulations!!! But since that’s probably not the case, as you begin to work through the process of another year’s planning, it is helpful to consider how effective last year’s marketing plan was. Here is a simple 10-question quiz to help you understand the effectiveness of the previous year’s plan. Give yourself one point for each correct answer.

1. Did your plan clearly articulate your target audience, including demographic information? (The correct answer would be something on the order of 20-34 years old, middle income, attending “X” school, and living in a “Y” neighborhood. If the answer is “anyone within the sound of our voice,” you must deduct 5 points from your score.)
2. Did your plan address which products fit your target demographic’s needs and why? (Choosing to target someone is all good, but if you can’t identify what product would fill a need in their life, it’s not worth your time to target it.)
3. Did you follow the strategies you laid out in your plan to reach your target demographic? (Did you do what you said you would do to get them, or did you write your plan, put it on a shelf, and ignore it?)
4. Did your target demographic grow last year? (Are there more 20-34-year-olds you can count as customers today than last year?)
5. Did your plan articulate how your company is differentiated from its competitors? (Does your company provide better service, product, location, or price?)
6. Did your plan discuss opportunities, threats, weaknesses, and strengths for your company to exploit/solve? (This is often seen as part of a SWOT analysis but could also be an 8-factor or 5-factor analysis.)
7. Did you execute the findings from your analysis above? (Writing it down wasn’t enough – you had to plan to do something with it.)
8. Were last year’s marketing plan’s objectives (and budget) consistent with the outcomes your company needed? (When the plan was crafted, was it designed to meet the company’s or the marketing department’s needs?)
9. Did you hit the budget you outlined in the marketing plan? (How close were you? Right on? Over? Under?)
10. Did you launch campaigns according to your annual marketing calendar? (Did you plan correctly for when different campaigns would be needed, or did you miss them entirely? How much of that had to do with items you had no way of foreseeing vs. items you should have known about?)

If your plan scored less than 5, the good news is you’ve much room for improvement with this year’s plan. If you scored less than 8, you can make a modest improvement in this year’s plan. If you scored a nine or a 10 — congratulations, you created a great plan! For the next few posts, I’ll be addressing the implications of each question independently to help you make an outstanding marketing plan for 2011. So be sure to check back to see if last year’s marketing plan had room for improvement.