evaluation of marketing in business plan

How to Evaluate a Marketing Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

Imagine creating an elaborate marketing plan, investing time and resources into it, and then never checking its effectiveness. Sounds counterproductive, right? Evaluating your marketing plan is imperative for business success, as it enables you to optimize marketing initiatives, make necessary adjustments, and ultimately drive sales.

In this blog post, we will guide you through a comprehensive step-by-step process on how to evaluate a marketing plan effectively and make data-driven decisions for continued growth.

By understanding the significance of evaluating your marketing plan, identifying key components for evaluation, analyzing marketing channels and initiatives, examining budget and expenses, measuring ROI and customer acquisition cost, and leveraging customer feedback, you can ensure your marketing strategies align with your overall business goals. Ready to optimize your marketing efforts and achieve better results? Let’s dive in!

Short Summary

  • Evaluating a marketing plan is essential for measuring its success and making necessary improvements to achieve business goals.
  • Key components of an effective evaluation include setting clear objectives, identifying relevant metrics, utilizing data-driven insights, and leveraging customer feedback & satisfaction.
  • Benchmarking performance against industry standards, testing new strategies, and monitoring progress are key steps in refining tactics to ensure the successful implementation of the marketing plan .

The Significance of Evaluating Your Marketing Plan

Evaluating a marketing plan is crucial for ensuring its effectiveness and making necessary improvements to achieve business success. An effective evaluation helps you make informed decisions about marketing efforts, investments, and strategies, ultimately driving sales and enhancing brand value. By analyzing financial data such as:

  • customer acquisition cost

You can assess your marketing plan’s effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.

You can identify trends and patterns that provide insights into your target market and the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

As a seasoned marketer, you must stay up-to-date with the latest marketing strategies and tactics, ensuring your marketing plan is optimized for generating leads, driving sales, and increasing overall market share. Evaluating your marketing plan’s effectiveness allows you to allocate your marketing budget effectively and optimize marketing costs, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes positively to your business’s success.

Key Components of an Effective Marketing Plan Evaluation

There are a few key components that make up an effective marketing plan evaluation. These components include setting clear objectives, identifying relevant metrics, and utilizing data-driven insights. By focusing on these elements, you can accurately assess the performance of your marketing plan and make informed decisions for optimization.

Before diving into how to evaluate your marketing plan, let’s first look at the essential components in more detail. In the following sections, we will discuss:

  • The importance of defining clear objectives
  • Identifying relevant metrics
  • Utilizing data-driven insights to ensure your marketing plan is on track to achieve its goals.

Defining Clear Objectives

Defining clear objectives is a crucial first step in evaluating your marketing plan. Establishing these objectives helps direct the assessment process and gauge success. Your marketing plan’s objectives may include:

  • Enhancing brand recognition
  • Generating leads
  • Increasing sales or revenue
  • Establishing authority in the industry

By defining your objectives upfront, you can better focus your marketing efforts, ensure your plan aligns with your overall business goals, and measure the effectiveness of your strategies.

Moreover, having clear objectives allows you to:

  • Establish benchmarks for success
  • Determine whether your marketing plan is on track to achieve its goals
  • Continuously monitor progress toward your objectives
  • Identify areas for improvement
  • Optimize your marketing strategies
  • Maximize your marketing effectiveness.

Identifying Relevant Metrics

Once you have defined clear objectives for your marketing plan, the next step is to identify relevant metrics to track and analyze. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and help you make informed decisions for optimization. Some key metrics to consider include:

  • Website Traffic
  • Lead generation
  • Conversion rate
  • Cost per lead
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)

By monitoring these metrics, you can determine which strategies are working and which ones need improvement.

In addition to tracking your marketing performance, it is essential to benchmark your metrics against industry standards. By comparing your performance to that of your competitors, you can identify areas where you excel and where there is room for improvement. This comparison allows you to make data-driven decisions about your marketing strategies, ensuring that your marketing efforts align with your business goals and contribute positively to your overall success.

Utilizing Data-Driven Insights

Data-driven insights play a pivotal role in making informed decisions and optimizing marketing strategies. By leveraging data from various sources and analyzing it at a detailed level, you can:

  • Identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement
  • Make strategic adjustments to your marketing plan
  • Allocate resources more effectively
  • Ultimately, achieve better outcomes and a higher return on investment.

For example, by analyzing website traffic data, you can determine which marketing channels are driving the most traffic and generating the most leads. This information can be used to adjust your marketing strategies, focusing more on high-performing channels and reducing spending on underperforming ones. By continuously analyzing data and refining your tactics based on the insights gathered, you can ensure your marketing plan is on the right track toward achieving its objectives and driving business success.

Assessing Marketing Channels and Initiatives

A crucial part of evaluating your marketing plan is assessing the performance of various marketing channels and initiatives. This includes analyzing both inbound and outbound marketing efforts to determine how well they are contributing to your overall marketing goals. By examining the effectiveness of your marketing channels, you can identify areas for improvement, optimize your strategies, and allocate your marketing budget more efficiently.

In the following sections, we will discuss how to assess the performance of inbound and outbound marketing strategies, including analyzing lead generation and conversion rates and measuring the return on investment for each marketing channel.

Inbound Marketing Analysis

Inbound marketing analysis is the evaluation and assessment of your inbound marketing strategy to determine its effectiveness in attracting and converting customers. This process involves analyzing the performance of various inbound marketing tactics, such as content creation, social media engagement, and lead generation. To accurately assess inbound marketing performance, metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rate, cost per lead, and customer lifetime value should be utilized.

By analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance your inbound marketing efforts. For instance, if your website traffic is low, you may need to focus more on content creation and search engine optimization to improve your online visibility. On the other hand, if your conversion rate is low, you may need to refine your lead nurturing process and optimize your calls to action.

By continuously analyzing your inbound marketing performance and making strategic adjustments, you can ensure your marketing plan is on track to achieve its objectives.

Outbound Marketing Analysis

Evaluating the success of outbound marketing efforts is equally important in assessing your marketing plan’s effectiveness. Outbound marketing strategies, such as:

  • TV advertisements
  • Radio advertisements
  • Print advertisements
  • Billboard advertisements

It can be more challenging to measure in terms of their influence on revenue and customer acquisition costs. However, by employing methods such as return on investment (ROI) analysis and measuring the impact of these strategies on your target market, you can gain valuable insights into their effectiveness.

By analyzing the ROI of your outbound marketing campaigns, you can determine which strategies are generating the most revenue and which ones may need to be adjusted or replaced. Additionally, by monitoring customer response and partner feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your outbound marketing efforts.

Continuously evaluating and refining your outbound marketing strategies is essential to ensure your marketing plan remains effective and aligned with your business goals.

Examining Marketing Budget and Expenses

A thorough evaluation of your marketing plan should also include an examination of your marketing budget and expenses. Analyzing your marketing expenses allows you to:

  • Identify areas for cost reduction
  • Optimize spending
  • Categorize expenses into different categories
  • Analyze each category to assess which expenses are generating the most revenue and which ones are not cost-effective.

In the following sections, we will discuss how to allocate your marketing spend effectively and optimize marketing costs to maximize ROI and achieve your marketing objectives.

Allocating Marketing Spend

Allocating marketing spend is essential as it helps establish definite objectives and expectations, directs employees’ efforts and actions, permits tracking of expenses, and ensures that funds are allocated toward specific marketing activities. The optimal approach to allocating your marketing spend is to consider the objectives of your marketing plan, your target audience, the available budget, and the expected return on investment.

By allocating your marketing budget effectively, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on the appropriate goals and that your spending is optimized to generate the best possible outcomes. Utilizing metrics such as cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and return on investment can help you assess the effectiveness of your marketing spend and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources.

evaluation of marketing in business plan

Optimizing Marketing Costs

Optimizing marketing costs is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing effort while reducing unnecessary expenses. By identifying opportunities to optimize marketing costs, you can allocate your budget more judiciously, target the appropriate audience, and assess the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Developing strategies to optimize marketing costs can be achieved by setting clear objectives, identifying relevant metrics, and utilizing data-driven insights. Establishing clear objectives allows marketing efforts to be focused on the appropriate goals while recognizing relevant metrics enables the assessment of the success of campaigns. Utilizing data-driven insights can aid in identifying areas where costs can be reduced, and campaigns can be improved.

Measuring Marketing ROI and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Measuring marketing ROI and customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a vital component of evaluating your marketing plan’s effectiveness. Marketing ROI calculates the effectiveness of your marketing activities by comparing earnings with the money spent on campaigns. This enables companies to determine the profitability of marketing investments. A positive ROI shows that the marketing campaign was effective. On the other hand, a negative ROI implies that it was not profitable.

On the other hand, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) analysis quantifies the cost of acquiring a new customer, taking into account all marketing and sales expenses. By measuring marketing ROI and CAC, you can determine the cost-effectiveness of your marketing initiatives and identify which strategies are generating the most revenue.

This information can be used to:

  • Allocate your marketing budget more efficiently
  • Ensure your marketing efforts contribute positively to your overall business success.

Evaluating Sales Team Collaboration and Integration

Another crucial aspect of evaluating your marketing plan is assessing the collaboration and integration between your marketing and sales teams. Effective collaboration between these two teams ensures seamless lead nurturing and conversion processes, ultimately resulting in improved sales and customer satisfaction. By evaluating the communication and teamwork within your sales team, you can pinpoint areas for development, promote a culture of collaboration and professional growth, and optimize productivity.

In addition to assessing the collaboration and integration within your sales team, it is essential to consider the impact of re-marketing efforts on increasing retention rates. Re-marketing is an effective tool for maintaining relationships with existing customers and encouraging repeat business, regardless of the type of business.

Continuously evaluating and refining your sales team’s collaboration and integration with marketing partners is essential to ensure the success of your marketing plan and the achievement of your overall business objectives.

Leveraging Customer Feedback and Satisfaction

Customer feedback and satisfaction are invaluable sources of information when evaluating your marketing plan’s effectiveness. By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and gathering feedback from your target demographic, you can gain direct insights into their perceptions of your product or service. This feedback can help you identify areas for improvement, adjust your marketing strategies, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In addition to customer satisfaction surveys, utilizing social media and other online channels to collect feedback can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. By leveraging this feedback, you can make data-driven decisions about your marketing strategies, ensuring that your marketing efforts align with your customers’ needs and expectations.

Benchmarking Performance Against Industry Standards

Benchmarking your marketing performance against industry standards and best practices is an effective way to gauge your marketing plan’s success and identify areas for improvement. By comparing your marketing metrics and key performance indicators with those of your competitors, you can determine where you excel and where there is room for growth.

Organizing and analyzing assessment results can be achieved by examining the data, recognizing patterns, and making modifications based on the findings. By continuously benchmarking your performance against industry standards, you can ensure that your marketing plan remains aligned with best practices and contributes positively to your overall business success.

Implementing Adjustments Based on Evaluation Results

The ultimate goal of evaluating your marketing plan is to make informed decisions and implement adjustments to improve its effectiveness. When reviewing and revising your marketing plan, it is important to consider the following:

  • Data-driven insights
  • Channels and initiatives
  • Budget and expenses
  • ROI and CAC
  • Sales team collaboration and integration
  • Customer feedback and satisfaction
  • Benchmarking performance against industry standards

In the following sections, we will discuss the importance of testing new strategies and monitoring progress to refine your tactics based on ongoing evaluation and feedback.

Testing New Strategies

Testing new strategies is essential for businesses to evaluate the effectiveness and potential impact of these strategies before committing to them. By conducting tests, businesses can:

  • Gather data and insights to make informed decisions
  • Optimize their approach
  • Identify any potential issues or challenges that may arise
  • Make necessary adjustments and improvements

Testing helps businesses make informed decisions and improve their overall strategy.

Some examples of successful testing strategies include A/B testing, multivariate testing, and split testing. These testing methods involve comparing different versions of a marketing campaign to determine which one yields better results. By continuously testing new strategies and making data-driven adjustments, you can ensure that your marketing plan remains effective and aligned with your overall business goals.

evaluation of marketing in business plan

Monitoring Progress and Refining Tactics

Continuously monitoring progress and refining tactics is essential for maintaining the effectiveness of your marketing plan. By regularly evaluating the performance of your marketing strategies and making data-driven adjustments, you can optimize your approach and achieve your desired objectives.

Some examples of successful monitoring progress and refining tactics include:

  • Utilizing analytics to track performance
  • Conducting customer segmentation
  • Leveraging customer feedback to make informed decisions about your marketing strategies

By maintaining a proactive approach to monitoring progress and refining tactics, you can ensure that your marketing plan remains on track to achieve its objectives and drive business growth through a well-executed marketing initiative.

Case Studies: Successful Marketing Plan Evaluations

Throughout this blog post, we have discussed the importance of evaluating your marketing plan and implementing adjustments based on the results. To illustrate the effectiveness of these evaluation methods, let’s consider some successful case studies.

  • A small e-commerce business used A/B testing to determine the most effective email marketing campaign, resulting in a significant increase in sales. By analyzing the performance of different email designs and subject lines, the company was able to optimize its marketing efforts and achieve better results.
  • A software company conducted an in-depth analysis of its inbound marketing strategies, including content creation, social media engagement, and lead generation. By monitoring key metrics and making data-driven adjustments, the company was able to increase website traffic, generate more leads, and improve overall marketing effectiveness.

These case studies demonstrate the power of evaluating marketing plans and making informed decisions based on the results. By implementing the evaluation methods and strategies discussed in this blog post, you can optimize your marketing efforts and achieve greater business success.

In conclusion, evaluating your marketing plan is essential for optimizing marketing initiatives, making necessary adjustments, and ultimately driving sales and enhancing brand value. By understanding the significance of evaluating your marketing plan, identifying key components for evaluation, analyzing marketing channels and initiatives, examining budget and expenses, measuring ROI and customer acquisition cost, and leveraging customer feedback, you can ensure your marketing strategies align with your overall business goals.

Continuously monitoring progress, testing new strategies, and refining tactics based on ongoing evaluation and feedback are crucial for maintaining the effectiveness of your marketing plan. By implementing the evaluation methods and strategies discussed in this blog post, you can make informed decisions about your marketing efforts, optimize your marketing strategies, and achieve better results for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you evaluate a marketing plan.

To evaluate a marketing plan, it is essential to consider metrics like Return on Investment (ROI), customer satisfaction, brand value, market share, and sales growth. Gathering customer feedback, partner insights, tracking, measuring, and refining the plan helps to determine its success.

Why should you evaluate the marketing plan?

Evaluating your marketing plan is essential for its successful implementation, as it allows you to track progress and identify areas of improvement. This way, you can ensure a return on investment while saving time and money.

What are the three keys points to an effective marketing plan?

An effective marketing plan requires a clearly defined target audience, setting achievable goals, developing a strong value proposition, creating compelling content, tracking progress, and continually refining the strategy.

This plan should be tailored to the specific needs of the business and its target audience. Goals should be realistic and measurable, and the value proposition should be clear and compelling. Content should be engaging and relevant to the target audience. Progress should be tracked.

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How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Plan

evaluation of marketing in business plan

How to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing plan

Any seasoned marketer knows that a marketing plan is ineffective without evaluating data. Understanding how to evaluate a Marketing Plan can save your company time, money and ensure a return on investment.

How should marketers evaluate their plans? For every marketing plan curated, marketers should closely track and monitor the plan as it progresses over time. This article helps marketers uncover what should be tracked to best evaluate the effectiveness of a plan.

What Should You Use to Evaluate For a Marketing Plan?

Here are a few metrics that should be used to evaluate your marketing plan.

  • Web traffic
  • Marketing goals
  • Marketing Qualified Leads
  • Channels & Campaigns
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Cost Per Outcome (CPO)

 1. Web Traffic 

Measuring online traffic over time is an important metric to track. How much traffic is your website driving compared to last month, or last year? An improvement in the number of website users means an increase in online visibility and a potential increase in marketing leads. 

2. Marketing Goals

When evaluating the effectiveness of a marketing plan, you must compare against established goals. Your plan should be goal-driven right from the start. Here are a few tips on setting  marketing goals:

  • Use SMART goals; Specific, Achievable, Timely, Measurable, and Realistic. List your goals so you know what to measure. 
  • Determine key marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) used to measure that goal. When measuring success, which marketing metrics matter to your business?
  • Your marketing goals should be directly related to the goals of your business.

Reviewing KPIs shows whether your marketing plan is on track to meet your goals. You’ll also be able to allocate marketing spend to those activities that bring in the best results. 

3.Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

The effectiveness of your marketing plan is not only about measuring the number of online marketing leads, but the quality of the leads you are driving. The qualification of your leads is important to business success.

If you find that your marketing leads are not translating to sales qualified leads, consider:

  • Meeting sales team: Review with your sales team the definition of a sales-qualified. Qualified leads should be reflected in your customer persona research. The content you create should be ICP friendly. Adjust your marketing plan and campaigns to fit the framework of qualified leads.
  • Finding campaigns/channels driving unqualified leads: Using Google Analytics goal tracking, you can evaluate the campaigns or channels responsible for driving high volumes of unqualified leads. Once this is determined, adjust audience settings, keywords, campaign messaging, or something else to better target your ideal audience.

4. Marketing Return on Investment (ROI) 

 “Marketers love empty calorie marketing, which is why stepping onto an ROI scale feels so humbling.” – Scott Todaro

Another way to evaluate a marketing plan is to look at your MROI (marketing ROI) and the factors that have impacted your return on investment.

  • Are you paying more for leads than the actual number of new leads? Tracking allows you to see how many new leads are coming in. If you’re paying for lead generation, is it worth the investment or do you need to tweak your marketing strategy? 
  • What is the cost of acquiring a new customer? When calculating this, be sure to factor in all marketing expenses, including the number of hours, costs of softwares and tools used to automate your efforts, and external help from agencies or freelancers.

5. Channels and Campaigns

When evaluating the effectiveness of your plan, one of the final steps is to make adjustments as needed. Keep these tips in mind during your evaluation:

  • Evaluate the channels and campaigns that prospective customers are coming from. 
  • Take the campaigns or channels performing the best, to emulate strategies or allocate more budget. 
  • For campaigns or channels that are not performing, evaluate what you can do to make them more effective, or pause a campaign and reallocate your budget into another campaign or channel.

6. Customer Satisfaction

Don’t forget about your current customers or clients! Marketing doesn’t stop once a sale is finalized. Re-marketing can effectively improve retention rates whether you’re a product or service-based business. This will in turn improve your LTV as well.

Consumer satisfaction is another way to measure the effectiveness of a marketing plan, from the first interaction to after a sale is made.

Listening to what your consumers say can provide feedback on how your marketing plan aligns with your organization’s position, customer service, and its effectiveness. Consider using the following to get a sense of customer satisfaction:

  • Focus Groups
  • Online reviews
  • Social listening

7. Cost Per Outcome

Cost per outcome is a measure of execution efficiency. It describes how much is being spent to achieve a specific metric.

CPO does not communicate business value, but it is useful to measure because it will tell you if your marketing activities are becoming more or less efficient at generating certain metrics. It’s important not to focus on empty calorie marketing. Your CPO may increase if your keywords become more expensive or competitive. CPO may decrease if you hone messaging to a target audience and conversion rates increase.

Marketers can decrease their CPO by:

  • Market Research
  • Segment Targeting
  • A/B Testing
  • Performance Adjusting

Evaluation of Marketing Plans is a Constant Effort

To see the results of an effective marketing plan, marketers should constantly measure and evaluate the plan’s performance, from beginning to end, with adjustments made along the way.

Planful’s marketing planning software can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing plans and improve the business value of marketing.

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5 ways to evaluate your Marketing Plan

There’s no denying it. You cannot consider yourself a great marketer unless you know your numbers.

Understanding how to evaluate a  Marketing Plan , including whether it is delivering the best possible results, can save you money and help you ensure the success of the company’s growth plan. Even though any evaluation should start by reviewing the Marketing Plan based on its objectives, here we include a list of ways to assess its success continuously:

1. Market Reaction  – The actions of your competitors are often a barometer to measure the success or failure of a  Marketing Plan . If competitors race to copy what you’ve done, the plan is affecting them and should be working. If your campaigns go largely ignored, there may be an issue, and an evaluation should be set in motion.

Also, your marketing partners will offer feedback about whether your  Marketing Plan  is working. Partner feedback reveals the effectiveness of your efforts to suppliers and vendors. These outside team members can feel the effects of a successful campaign before you do because they have more direct interaction with customers.

2. Customer Response  – Customer response in all its varied forms can help determine what type of reactions your marketing efforts create. Customer service feedback, online engagement, and click-thru rate can reveal what your customers think of your efforts and which campaigns or programs have the greatest impact. Basic questions like How did you find out about us? Can reveal which initiatives in the  Marketing Plan  are reaching the customer and driving sales.

Other complementary metrics can measure the effectiveness based on the tactic or vehicle used in the plan. Make sure you are promoting in the right vehicle. Choose media to suit your selected audience and be as accurate as possible.  Online efforts  will have more opportunities to gather results on customer response, with the option to optimize continuously.

If your market reach is expanding, your marketing plan’s effectiveness is the probable cause. Marketing that makes its way into new segments, either by customer recommendation or natural indirect growth, indicates a compelling marketing message and a validated value proposition. Remember that it is always important that the product or service delivers on its value proposition, tied with the campaign.

3. Sales   Performance  – They should be going up! Examining the numbers can be the fastest and primary way to determine whether your plan is working. For example, suppose your overall sales for the last period totaled $10,000 (without marketing efforts) and your total sales for this period ended at $15,000. In that case, you can deduce that your Marketing Plan has a positive effect. Consider other variables like a rise in prices or sales strategies, but with all the external factors included and in raw numbers, you are selling more this period.

Salespeople can be an excellent barometer for the measurement of marketing effectiveness. Ask for their feedback to determine whether the efforts are practical. If the feedback is overwhelmingly negative or customers are not responding, you should revise your plan and better address the sales force needs to assure growth.

Also, check your sales conversion rate. The best approach is to look at your historical records and determine whether your conversion from lead to customer rate has improved. Remember that different strategies run on various sales cycles. A brand-building effort typically requires a long-term investment before yielding a noticeable profit. Meanwhile, sales promotions can provide small returns faster. Effective sales conversion is an important part of achieving growth, so make sure you assess your success at closing the deal rather than just focusing on generating leads.

4. Cost-Per-Acquisition  – You aren’t a top-notch marketer if you’re not tracking the one metric that matters above all others:  Marketing Cost-Per-Acquisition  (CPA). Don’t get me wrong; all effectiveness metrics are necessary. But, while all metrics are essential to any well-run effort, Marketing CPA it’s the quintessential metric for determining real return on investment. It doesn’t matter the market or customer response. In the end, the marketing effort is not generating revenue. It’s not successful.

Tracking the historic CPA for each product is essential. If the market conditions remain the same for the new period, the goal for your marketing team should be to decrease the Marketing CPA. These metrics serve as an option to determine the budget needed to comply with business goals and an efficient way of managing the complicated planning process with the finance department. If you are looking for outside investors for your company, the  Marketing CPA  metric takes more importance.

Marketing CPA  is vital to investors. They can determine business profitability by looking at the difference between how much they can profit from customers and acquisition costs. Investors are concerned with the current relationship, not with future promises. They use it to optimize the return on their investments. In other words, if the Marketing CPA can be reduced, the company’s profit margin improves, making a larger profit. In the end, investors are more interested in providing the resources the company needs while the company continuously improves its profit margins.

5. Return-on-Investment   – Does the marketing investment bring in enough new or repeat business to justify the expense? Return-on-Investment(ROI) is the top concern regarding marketing expenses. The end goal is to check whether your marketing investment results in profit. All the other indicators can help you evaluate effectiveness, but you must measure the amount spent versus its benefit to assess efficiency. In the end, the business needs to make a profit to survive.

Even if you think you’re getting a high ROI overall, you may do even better by changing or eliminating unproductive tactics. When it works, marketing ultimately converts leads into customers. This conversion process should prove itself in a calculable profit. Examine all the marketing plan elements to see which justify themselves financially. You can calculate an overall measurement, but a more accurate breakdown by marketing initiative will tell you exactly which effort worked. Continue with the steps that work, and optimize the actions that fall short. The  Marketing Plan  should be revised accordingly.

One important metric to evaluate ROI is to develop a  Customer Profitabilit y measure. According to master marketer Philip Kotler, a profitable customer is “ a person, household or a company that over time, yields a revenue stream that exceeds by an acceptable amount the company’s cost stream of attracting, selling and servicing the customer .” Calculating  Customer Profitability  is a major step in evaluating the ultimate response to not only the  Marketing Plan but the entire operation. You will find out that some customers are unprofitable, so you will be able to focus on acquiring and servicing the most profitable prospects.

With “ half my media spend is working, I just don’t know what half,”  marketing pioneer John Wanamaker summarizes the difficulty of measuring the effect of marketing investment. While marketing is not scientific, a commitment to evaluation ensures that each effort can be adequately understood and future strategies can be developed based on performance. Today, many companies can engage in highly targeted campaigns to track prospects as they progress from leads to loyal customers. We recommend businesses the assembly of a Marketing Effectiveness Scorecard to monitor the results of a Marketing Plan. It should track relevant metrics from all five points to assess the effects of a plan in achieving the overall business goals. After all, you aren’t a great marketer if you aren’t tracking the numbers.

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What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One [+Examples]

Clifford Chi

Published: December 27, 2023

For a while now, you've been spearheading your organization's content marketing efforts, and your team's performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

marketing plan and how to write one

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you‘ve never done something like that before. You don't even know where to start.

Download Now: Free Marketing Plan Template [Get Your Copy]

Fortunately, we've curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that's rooted in data and produces results. But first, we'll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You'll also discover what works and what doesn't. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

HubSpot Mktg plan cover

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template to get started .

To learn more about how to create your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the section you’re looking for:

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Types of marketing plans, marketing plan examples, marketing plan faqs, sample marketing plan.

Marketing plan definition graphic

If you're pressed for time or resources, you might not be thinking about a marketing plan. However, a marketing plan is an important part of your business plan.

Marketing Plan vs. Business Plan

A marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.

A business plan is also a strategic document. But this plan covers all aspects of a company's operations, including finance, operations, and more. It can also help your business decide how to distribute resources and make decisions as your business grows.

I like to think of a marketing plan as a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals.

Keep in mind that there's a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

evaluation of marketing in business plan

Free Marketing Plan Template

Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

  • Pre-Sectioned Template
  • Completely Customizable
  • Example Prompts
  • Professionally Designed

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they'll use to execute that mission and track its success.

For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It's the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, suppose your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. The marketing department needs to develop a marketing plan that'll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.

The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.

To summarize, the business's marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving signups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies : a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and a Twitter account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation.

Learn what they are below.

  • State your business's mission.
  • Determine the KPIs for this mission.
  • Identify your buyer personas.
  • Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
  • Clearly define your plan's omissions.
  • Define your marketing budget.
  • Identify your competition.
  • Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

1. State your business's mission.

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business‘s main mission statement.

From my experience, you want to be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

mission-statement-examples

Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) .

KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business's current and potential customers. So, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

buyer-persona-templates

Create your buyer personas with this free guide and set of buyer persona templates.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here's where you'll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there's a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you'll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

When I write this section , I like to stipulate:

  • Which types of content I'll create. These might include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
  • How much of it I'll create. I typically describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on my workflow and the short-term goals for my content.
  • The goals (and KPIs) I'll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
  • The channels on which I'll distribute my content. Popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
  • Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.

Build out your marketing plan with this free template.

Fill out this form to access the template., 5. clearly define your plan's omissions..

A marketing plan explains the marketing team's focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you aren't serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn't on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

In my experience, this section is particularly important for stakeholders to help them understand why certain decisions were made.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Whether it's freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

marketing-budget-templates

You can establish your marketing budget with this kit of 8 free marketing budget templates .

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing whom you're marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.

Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

competitive-analysis-templates

Easily track and analyze your competitors with t his collection of ten free competitive analysis templates .

8. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it's time to explain who’s doing what. I don't like to delve too deeply into my employees’ day-to-day projects, but I know which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it’s time to get to work. Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven't done it before. That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates that can help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.

Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started using this free template.

Depending on the company you work with, you might want to create various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans

These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you'll take on in a certain period.

marketing plan examples: forbes

Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost 4 million views. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template will teach you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

  • Executive Summary
  • Target Customers
  • Unique Selling Proposition
  • Pricing & Positioning Strategy
  • Distribution Plan
  • Your Offers
  • Marketing Materials
  • Promotions Strategy
  • Online Marketing Strategy
  • Conversion Strategy
  • Joint Ventures & Partnerships
  • Referral Strategy
  • Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
  • Retention Strategy
  • Financial Projections

If you're truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, I highly recommend using this guide to help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan

This type of plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media. A specific subtype is a paid marketing plan, which highlights paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.

Shane Snow's Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team is a great example of a social media marketing plan:

Contently's content strategy waterfall.

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book, "Dream Team," he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So, he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall. The content strategy waterfall is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach.

Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall‘s content strategy helped him launch his new book successfully. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

  • Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
  • Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 in sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
  • Created buyer personas to figure out which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content.
  • Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
  • Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
  • Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
  • Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

I use Snow's marketing plan to think more creatively about my content promotion and distribution plan. I like that it's linear and builds on the step before it, creating an air-tight strategy that doesn't leave any details out.

→ Free Download: Social Media Calendar Template [Access Now]

3. Content Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you'll use content to promote your business or product.

HubSpot's Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy is a strong example of a content marketing plan:

marketing plan examples: hubspot content marketing plan

At HubSpot, we‘ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. So, we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team's size.

Download Now: Free Content Marketing Planning Templates

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you'll learn:

  • What exactly content marketing is.
  • Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
  • Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
  • How to structure your content marketing team based on your company's size.
  • How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
  • What marketing tools and technology you'll need to succeed.
  • What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
  • The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
  • And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

This is fantastic resource for content teams of any size — whether you're a team of one or 100. It includes how to hire and structure a content marketing team, what marketing tools you'll need, what type of content you should create, and even recommends what metrics to track for analyzing campaigns.

4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan

This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you‘ll implement to promote a new product. And if you’re searching for an example, look no further than Chief Outsiders' Go-To-Market Plan for a New Product :

marketing plan examples: chief outsiders

After reading this plan, you'll learn how to:

  • Validate a product
  • Write strategic objectives
  • Identify your market
  • Compile a competitive landscape
  • Create a value proposition for a new product
  • Consider sales and service in your marketing plan

If you're looking for a marketing plan for a new product, the Chief Outsiders template is a great place to start. Marketing plans for a new product will be more specific because they target one product versus its entire marketing strategy.

5. Growth Marketing Plan

Growth marketing plans use experimentation and data to drive results, like we see in Venture Harbour’s Growth Marketing Plan Template :

marketing plan examples: venture harbour

Venture Harbour's growth marketing plan is a data-driven and experiment-led alternative to the more traditional marketing plan. Their template has five steps intended for refinement with every test-measure-learn cycle. The five steps are:

  • Experiments

Download Now: Free Growth Strategy Template

I recommend this plan if you want to experiment with different platforms and campaigns. Experimentation always feels risky and unfamiliar, but this plan creates a framework for accountability and strategy.

  • Louisville Tourism
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Visit Oxnard
  • Safe Haven Family Shelter
  • Wright County Economic Development
  • The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County
  • Cabarrus County Convention and Visitors Bureau
  • Visit Billings

1. Louisville Tourism

Louisville Tourism Marketing Plan

It also divides its target market into growth and seed categories to allow for more focused strategies. For example, the plan recognizes Millennials in Chicago, Atlanta, and Nashville as the core of it's growth market, whereas people in Boston, Austin, and New York represent seed markets where potential growth opportunities exist. Then, the plan outlines objectives and tactics for reaching each market.

Why This Marketing Plan Works

  • The plan starts with a letter from the President & CEO of the company, who sets the stage for the plan by providing a high-level preview of the incoming developments for Louisville's tourism industry
  • The focus on Louisville as "Bourbon City" effectively leverages its unique cultural and culinary attributes to present a strong brand
  • Incorporates a variety of data points from Google Analytics, Arrivalist, and visitor profiles to to define their target audience with a data-informed approach

2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

University Illinois

For example, students who become prospects as freshman and sophomore will receive emails that focus on getting the most out of high school and college prep classes. Once these students become juniors and seniors — thus entering the consideration stage — the emails will focus more on the college application process and other exploratory content.

  • The plan incorporates competitive analysis, evaluation surveys, and other research to determine the makeup of its target audience
  • The plan lists each marketing program (e.g., direct mail, social media, email etc.) and supplements it with examples on the next page
  • Each marketing program has its own objectives, tactics, and KPIs for measuring success

3. Visit Oxnard

This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with all the information one needs in a marketing plan: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.

It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic. Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.

  • States clear and actionable goals for the coming year
  • Includes data and other research that shows how their team made their decisions
  • Outlines how the team will measure the success of their plan

4. Safe Haven Family Shelter

marketing plan examples: safe haven family shelter

This marketing plan by a nonprofit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization. It includes SMART marketing goals , deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages , and metrics.

The plan is detailed, yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for its upcoming marketing efforts.

  • Confirms ongoing marketing strategies and objectives while introducing new initiatives
  • Uses colors, fonts, and formatting to emphasize key parts of the plan
  • Closes with long-term goals, key themes, and other overarching topics to set the stage for the future

5. Wright County Economic Development

marketing plan examples: wright county

Wright County Economic Development’s plan drew our attention because of its simplicity, making it good inspiration for those who’d like to outline their plan in broad strokes without frills or filler.

It includes key information such as marketing partners, goals, initiatives, and costs. The sections are easy to scan and contain plenty of information for those who’d like to dig into the details. Most important, it includes a detailed breakdown of projected costs per marketing initiative — which is critical information to include for upper-level managers and other stakeholders.

  • Begins with a quick paragraph stating why the recommended changes are important
  • Uses clear graphics and bullet points to emphasize key points
  • Includes specific budget data to support decision-making

6. The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County

marketing plan examples: cultural council of palm beach county

This marketing plan presentation by a cultural council is a great example of how to effectively use data in your plan, address audiences who are new to the industry, and offer extensive detail into specific marketing strategies.

For instance, an entire slide is dedicated to the county’s cultural tourism trends, and at the beginning of the presentation, the organization explains what an arts and culture agency is in the first place.

That’s a critical piece of information to include for those who might not know. If you’re addressing audiences outside your industry, consider defining terms at the beginning, like this organization did.

  • Uses quality design and images to support the goals and priorities in the text
  • Separate pages for each big idea or new strategy
  • Includes sections for awards and accomplishments to show how the marketing plan supports wider business goals
  • Defines strategies and tactics for each channel for easy skimming

7. Cabarrus County Convention & Visitors Bureau

marketing plan examples: carrabus county

Cabarrus County’s convention and visitors bureau takes a slightly different approach with its marketing plan, formatting it like a magazine for stakeholders to flip through. It offers information on the county’s target audience, channels, goals, KPIs, and public relations strategies and initiatives.

We especially love that the plan includes contact information for the bureau’s staff members, so that it’s easy for stakeholders to contact the appropriate person for a specific query.

  • Uses infographics to expand on specific concepts, like how visitors benefit a community
  • Highlights the team members responsible for each initiative with a photo to emphasize accountability and community
  • Closes with an event calendar for transparency into key dates for events

8. Visit Billings

marketing plan examples: visit billings

Visit Billing’s comprehensive marketing plan is like Cabarrus County’s in that it follows a magazine format. With sections for each planned strategy, it offers a wealth of information and depth for internal stakeholders and potential investors.

We especially love its content strategy section, where it details the organization’s prior efforts and current objectives for each content platform.

At the end, it includes strategic goals and budgets — a good move to imitate if your primary audience would not need this information highlighted at the forefront.

  • Includes a section on the buyer journey, which offers clarity on the reasoning for marketing plan decisions
  • Design includes call-outs for special topics that could impact the marketing audience, such as safety concerns or "staycations"
  • Clear headings make it easy to scan this comprehensive report and make note of sections a reader may want to return to for more detail

What is a typical marketing plan?

In my experience, most marketing plans outline the following aspects of a business's marketing:

  • Target audience

Each marketing plan should include one or more goals, the path your team will take to meet those goals, and how you plan to measure success.

For example, if I were a tech startup that's launching a new mobile app, my marketing plan would include:

  • Target audience or buyer personas for the app
  • Outline of how app features meet audience needs
  • Competitive analysis
  • Goals for conversion funnel and user acquisition
  • Marketing strategies and tactics for user acquisition

Featured resource : Free Marketing Plan Template

What should a good marketing plan include?

A good marketing plan will create a clear roadmap for your unique marketing team. This means that the best marketing plan for your business will be distinct to your team and business needs.

That said, most marketing plans will include sections for one or more of the following:

  • Clear analysis of the target market
  • A detailed description of the product or service
  • Strategic marketing mix details (such as product, price, place, promotion)
  • Measurable goals with defined timelines

This can help you build the best marketing plan for your business.

A good marketing plan should also include a product or service's unique value proposition, a comprehensive marketing strategy including online and offline channels, and a defined budget.

Featured resource : Value Proposition Templates

What are the most important parts of a marketing plan?

When you‘re planning a road trip, you need a map to help define your route, step-by-step directions, and an estimate of the time it will take to get to your destination. It’s literally how you get there that matters.

Like a road map, a marketing plan is only useful if it helps you get to where you want to go. So, no one part is more than the other.

That said, you can use the list below to make sure that you've added or at least considered each of the following in your marketing plan:

  • Marketing goals
  • Executive summary
  • Target market analysis
  • Marketing strategies

What questions should I ask when making a marketing plan?

Questions are a useful tool for when you‘re stuck or want to make sure you’ve included important details.

Try using one or more of these questions as a starting point when you create your marketing plan:

  • Who is my target audience?
  • What are their needs, motivations, and pain points?
  • How does our product or service solve their problems?
  • How will I reach and engage them?
  • Who are my competitors? Are they direct or indirect competitors?
  • What are the unique selling points of my product or service?
  • What marketing channels are best for the brand?
  • What is our budget and timeline?
  • How will I measure the success of marketing efforts?

How much does a marketing plan cost?

Creating a marketing plan is mostly free. But the cost of executing a marketing plan will depend on your specific plan.

Marketing plan costs vary by business, industry, and plan scope. Whether your team handles marketing in-house or hires external consultants can also make a difference. Total costs can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands. This is why most marketing plans will include a budget.

Featured resource : Free Marketing Budget Templates

What is a marketing plan template?

A marketing plan template is a pre-designed structure or framework that helps you outline your marketing plan.

It offers a starting point that you can customize for your specific business needs and goals. For example, our template includes easy-to-edit sections for:

  • Business summary
  • Business initiatives
  • Target market
  • Market strategy
  • Marketing channels
  • Marketing technology

Let’s create a sample plan together, step by step.

Follow along with HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template .

HubSpot Mktg plan cover

1. Create an overview or primary objective.

Our business mission is to provide [service, product, solution] to help [audience] reach their [financial, educational, business related] goals without compromising their [your audience’s valuable asset: free time, mental health, budget, etc.]. We want to improve our social media presence while nurturing our relationships with collaborators and clients.

For example, if I wanted to focus on social media growth, my KPIs might look like this:

We want to achieve a minimum of [followers] with an engagement rate of [X] on [social media platform].

The goal is to achieve an increase of [Y] on recurring clients and new meaningful connections outside the platform by the end of the year.

Use the following categories to create a target audience for your campaign.

  • Profession:
  • Background:
  • Pain points:
  • Social media platforms that they use:
  • Streaming platforms that they prefer:

For more useful strategies, consider creating a buyer persona in our Make My Persona tool .

Our content pillars will be: [X, Y, Z].

Content pillars should be based on topics your audience needs to know. If your ideal clients are female entrepreneurs, then your content pillars can be: marketing, being a woman in business, remote working, and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.

Then, determine any omissions.

This marketing plan won’t be focusing on the following areas of improvement: [A, B, C].

5. Define your marketing budget.

Our marketing strategy will use a total of [Y] monthly. This will include anything from freelance collaborations to advertising.

6. Identify your competitors.

I like to work through the following questions to clearly indicate who my competitors are:

  • Which platforms do they use the most?
  • How does their branding differentiate?
  • How do they talk to their audiences?
  • What valuable assets do customers talk about? And if they are receiving any negative feedback, what is it about?

7. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

Create responsible parties for each portion of the plan.

Marketing will manage the content plan, implementation, and community interaction to reach the KPIs.

  • Social media manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Content strategist: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Community manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Sales will follow the line of the marketing work while creating and implementing an outreach strategy.

  • Sales strategists: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Sales executives: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Customer Service will nurture clients’ relationships to ensure that they have what they want. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Project Managers will track the progress and team communication during the project. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Get started on your marketing plan.

These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started. But, to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you'll likely need to test some different ideas out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure t o learn more about how we use AI.

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7 Ways to Evaluate Your Marketing Plan

by Stefon Walters

Published on 23 Jul 2019

Companies can not survive for long without effective marketing. Marketing plans establish a company's primary goals and strategies for promoting its products or services. After a company plans and sets its marketing plans in motion, it is essential that it follows up with an evaluation of the marketing plan using some or all of these seven ways to view the market evaluation process.

1. Return on Investment

When companies put together marketing plans and spend money putting them into action, they expect to see a return on their investment. Whatever they spend, they expect to receive more in value — whether in the form of sales that exceed the money spent or in the form of new customers that will pay off over time. Having concrete end goals in mind helps companies determine if they have received an adequate return on investment.

2. Reviewing Sales Numbers

Evaluating sales numbers is the most fundamental way to determine the effectiveness of a marketing plan. The easiest way to do this is by comparing post-marketing campaign sales totals with prior periods. For example, if a company was doing $50,000 in shoe sales before a marketing campaign and those sales increase to $75,000 afterward, it is a safe assumption that the campaign was effective.

Some marketing efforts, such as plans that are implemented with long-term intentions, cannot be measured with a simple side-by-side sales comparison in a specific period.

3. Examining Lead Generation

Not all marketing efforts lead to direct sales. However, if a company generates leads from its efforts, the marketing is considered successful because leads fuel the sales funnel. Lead generation comes in forms such as an increase in appointments, an increase in subscribers to a mailing list or an increase in responses in general. Setting quantifiable goals makes tracking lead generations much more useful.

4. Reach of Marketing Efforts

Marketing that expands into new regions is a positive sign. Customer recommendations and word-of-mouth can broaden the reach of marketing campaigns and is usually a positive indicator. The more customer referrals, the better.

5. Paying Attention to Customer Response

Marketing plans are geared toward customers — both current and future. How customers respond to marketing efforts is a sign of a plan's effectiveness. Surveys are a direct way to solicit customer input on specific aspects of marketing campaigns. No matter how good a company feels about its marketing plan, if customers do not feel the same way, it is ineffective.

6. Feedback From Salespeople

It is not enough for companies to hear back from the employees tasked with creating a marketing plan; they must also value the input from their salespeople. Salespeople interact directly with customers, which gives them insight that can help in the evaluation of the plan.

7. Competitor Response to Marketing Plans

The way competitors respond to a marketing plan is often a sign of its effectiveness. If a company puts out a marketing campaign and its competitors replicate it, that is a sign that the campaign is working and gaining traction. If all the competitors in a company's sector go in a different direction with their marketing efforts, it could be because they noticed inefficiencies in a company's marketing plans.

Why Are Implementation, Evaluation & Control of the Marketing Plan Necessary?

  • Small Business
  • Advertising & Marketing
  • Marketing Plans
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Principles of Marketing Management

List of the components of a strategic marketing plan, how to reinstall avg.

  • Goals of a Team Leader
  • Marketing Strategy vs. Operational Plans

Implementation, evaluation and control are like the three legs of a stool; remove one, and the stool wobbles and crashes to the ground. If you remove one of these items from a marketing plan, it falls apart, and the plan won't succeed. All three are necessary for the successful completion of marketing activities that help businesses achieve their strategic goals.

Strategy Vs. Implementation

The strategy section of a marketing plan describes the market position the business hopes to achieve given the current economic climate and competition. The implementation section outlines the exact steps the business will take to achieve the strategy. Both are equally important.

A great strategy with poor implementation won't help the business achieve its goals, because it won't take the proper steps to achieve the strategy. A poor strategy with great implementation is also a waste of time and money; the tactical steps may be flawlessly executed, but without a strong strategic vision, they won't achieve the company's goals. Both must be equally well-conceived and executed to successfully achieve marketing goals.

Implementation of a Marketing Plan

Missteps in the implementation phase of a marketing plan can be disastrous. Implementation means execution, or the actual steps the company will take to promote its business. These steps may include running ads, launching a website or sending direct mail. If the implementation isn't completed according to plan, the company won't achieve its strategic objectives. The best ideas still need to be enacted. The implementation phase of the marketing plan makes sure the marketing activities happen in the correct time and sequence for success.

Evaluation of a Marketing Plan

The evaluation step of a marketing plan focuses on analyzing quantitative and qualitative metrics associated with the implementation and strategy. Quantifiable metrics are those to which numbers can be attached, such as the numbers of sales leads obtained, customers reached and dollar amounts achieved. Qualitative factors include measures of customer satisfaction.

Evaluating the marketing plan means looking at the data and examining whether or not the company achieved its strategy objectives from the implementation phase. If it did, the steps can be replicated for future success. If not, changes can be made to improve performance and results.

Controls to Evaluate a Marketing Plan

Controls are necessary for the evaluation phase. Controls established during the creation of the marketing plan provide benchmarks to assess how well the plan accomplished its goals. Controls are like goals; they give the company something to aim for when enacting the plan. Controls may include measures such as the marketing budgets and market share.

  • MaRS: Implementation and Control: Kotler on Marketing
  • CEOpedia: Implementation and control of marketing plan

Jeanne Grunert has been a writer since 1990. Covering business, marketing, gardening and health topics, her work has appeared in the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books, "Horse Illustrated" and many national publications. Grunert earned her Master of Arts in writing from Queens College and a Master of Science in direct and interactive marketing from New York University.

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Home Market Research

Market Evaluation: What is it & How To Conduct it?

Market evaluation identifies the brand's market size, growth strengths, & shortcomings. It shows the current trends that need to be followed.

Market evaluation is an important part of starting a new business or growing one you already have. So, before you take a big step regarding your business, you must thoroughly evaluate your market. 

A proper evaluation of the market may accurately determine the opportunity, value, risks, customer purchasing behavior, market rivalry, and other important factors that may affect the organization’s growth.

In this blog, we will define market evaluation and provide a step-by-step guide on how to do one. Stay with us to learn more about it.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

What is Market Evaluation?

Market evaluation is the process of research and analysis of a specific market. This process involves gathering quantitative and qualitative data, such as the market size, statistics, average prices in the target market, customers’ buying habits, and more.

The evaluated data is utilized to form conclusions and forecast the success and profitability of a business initiative at a specific time and location. It can also help businesses find their position in the market, set themselves apart from competitors, and develop a good marketing and advertising plan.

Furthermore, market evaluations assist in identifying threats, mitigating risks, and assessing the overall attractiveness of the sector and a specific market within it.

How to Conduct Market Evaluation

A marketing evaluation is a simple process, but it takes a lot of dedicated research. Here, we will explore a step-by-step guide to teach you how to evaluate your market.

  • Determine the current state of the market.

The first section of your market analysis should include an overview or description of the market in which you want to operate. Take a look at some common factors that you should analyze:

  • Are there any current trends that affect the market?
  • What is the growth rate of the market?
  • What is the lifecycle of products and services in the market?

These are all questions your market overview should answer. This section is always at the top of your document, but it may be simpler to finish it after you have finished your research.

  • Analyze your target customer.

Analyzing your target audience is the next step of market evaluation. No matter how great your product is, you can not sell it to everyone. It would be a huge waste of time to try. Thus, the best strategy is to target your niche market, which will most likely buy your product.

You will need to define your segmentation strategy to help you find people in your target audience . Target segments enable you to segment your audience based on groups of shared characteristics, such as:

  • Demographics: Age, gender, occupation, level of education, and religion
  • Geographics: Where your target customer lives and works
  • Psychographics: What your customers are interested in, what they are passionate about, or what personal values they are likely to have.

QuestionPro can help you in market evaluation by analyzing your target customer by providing a complete survey platform with excellent features. You can find out what your customer thinks about your product and service by conducting surveys.

  • Analyze your competitors.

Another vital part of the market is your competitors. It’s very rare to find a market need that is not already being met by a business.

In this step of market evaluation, you will need to research the companies with whom you will be competing for customers. The following are some of the key topics you should cover:

  • Identifying your direct and indirect competitors
  • Market share of your competitors
  • Their strengths and weaknesses

After you have done research on each competitor, it can be helpful to rank them from most dangerous to least dangerous to your business.

  • Set up financial projections

In this part, you will attempt to evaluate your company’s income potential. You should include the following numbers:

  • Potential market share: Explain how your sales and marketing efforts will help you get the market share or valuation you want.
  • Cash flow: How much loss you will expect at the start, when you will break even, and when you will make a profit.
  • Pricing and gross margin: What your products will cost versus what it will cost you to manufacture or source products for online sales.

If you are conducting a market analysis for a new business, your projections will be based on guesses, which is fine until you have hard data.

  • Understand industry regulations

The last topic that needs in market evaluation is whether you need to follow any industry regulations.

For example, if you sell skincare products, you will need to check the rules about skincare in the country where you do business. Another example could be that you need a license to sell a certain kind of product, like medicines.

Learning about the rules in your niche is important because breaking the law can lead to fines and sometimes even jail time. It’s best to fill out this section as completely as possible.

Conducting a market evaluation is an important step in developing your business. It’s one of the first things you will do when you start making your business ideas come true.

Whether you conduct the research yourself or hire someone else to do it,  thorough market evaluations might be the difference between your business trying to get started and flourishing. 

QuestionPro can be the best option for you if you consider evaluating your market. It provides various products and services, such as survey design and distribution, data collection and analysis, reporting and visualization, feedback management, and so on.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

You can use these tools to evaluate markets and gather data on customer behavior, market trends, and other factors that can assist businesses in making informed decisions about their products, services, and strategies. Contact us for more information or a free trial.

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Top 5 Marketing Plan Evaluation Example Templates With Samples

Top 5 Marketing Plan Evaluation Example Templates With Samples

Komal Jaiswal

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Do you want to unlock the blueprint for launching new products? Are you struggling to understand the needs of your target audience? If yes, then our series of marketing plan templates will help you to meet these criteria by assisting you in developing your marketing goals within an affordable budget. 

Every business, be it small or large, requires a marketing plan because it is what will drive sales for that company. This is why it is essential to evaluate your marketing plan, as it covers minute details of what's to come in the future and what changes would be required to adjust to that new world!

Marketing is so crucial for a company's growth that it is an omnipresent, omniscient function. This means it is a continuous process; for example, the job does not stop once a marketing plan is set in motion. Thorough monitoring of the tasks is required, and constant feedback from the customers must be factored in when executing the successive layers of jobs so that it fulfils your company's goals as well. 

Now, if you have ever felt that you don't know what strategy will work for your brand, then worry no more because SlideTeam presents you with Top 5 marketing plan evaluation PPT templates that will help you connect everything, ensuring that the right plan is being executed at the right time! 

The 100% customizable nature of the templates provides you with the desired flexibility to edit your presentations. The content ready slides give you the much-needed structure.

Let’s study these templates. 

Template 1: Partner Marketing Plan Evaluation Matrix

It is always a great idea to seek out marketing professionals for specific projects and tasks as it allows a company to access resources they don't have first-hand command over. However, the dilemma lies in choosing the perfect partner for your brand that will also uphold your work culture. This Partner Marketing Plan Evaluation Matrix PPT template has been designed to help you compare partners and select the most suitable one as per your company goals. Here the six evaluation criteria are - Strategy, Buy-In, Branding, Customers, and Resources which can also be further customized. Download it now and form true partnerships. 

Partner marketing plan evaluation matrix

Download Now!

Template 2: Digital Marketing Budget Spending Evaluation

In today's world, if you want to reach a wider pool of audience, then digital marketing is the way to go. If you open a store but are not going online about it, then you are not telling people about your business! This PPT template will help you to avoid making that mistake, and gain a global reach with lower cost and multiple strategies. The 100% editable template highlights a circular graph that can be used to determine various online marketing channels tailored to your business or even present your internal team with considerable spending on developing a solid content strategy. Grab it now to increase your market and consumer awareness!

Digital Marketing Budget Spending Evaluation

Template 3: Partners’ Evaluation Scorecard Partner Marketing Plan PPT template

The world has become highly data-oriented today and companies are relying on it heavily to make informed decisions because it guarantees accuracy and positive results. The case is not so different when choosing the right partners to improve one's marketing strategy. When businesses seek partnerships, you may not want to partner with a brand whose products will sabotage yours, or you may not want to partner with a brand that does not specialize in your product! How will you determine these factors? Well, now you can, as our SlideTeam presents a Different Partners Evaluation Scorecard PPT template which contains parameters that are relevant to the attributes of a strong marketing plan.

Different Partners Evaluation Scorecard

Template 4: Business Communications System Marketing Plan Evaluation Talent Pipeline

Strategy, Branding, and Customer service are the three major pillars of any business in today's modern world. These three pillars are tied together with the help of effective communication, be it consistently reflecting a particular message to your target audience or building relationships among managers and employees to foster a culture of collaboration and fellowship. However, problems crop up when there is a significant problem in a company's business communication system; this slide will allow you to discover those flaws immediately. The editable template has six stages that are shown with graphic details and deal with concepts like Talent Pipeline, Marketing Plan Evaluation, and Business communications System, allowing you to convey your message.

Business Communications System Marketing Plan Evaluation…

Template 5: Competitive Analysis Marketing Plans Cloud Strategy Customized Evaluation

The slide on Competitive Analysis Marketing Plans Cloud Strategy Evaluation PPT Template is a perfect guide to the research about your company’s major competitors. If you want to gain significant insights into your competition’s internal and external assets, then this PPT slide can act as a premium solution. This slide provides five stages of a business production chain, like Cloud Strategy, Marketing Plans, and more. This pre-fabricated template will save you effort and time in curating a high-performing marketing plan.

Competitive Analysis Marketing Plans Cloud Strategy…

FAQs ON MARKETING PLAN EVALUATION

How should a marketing strategy be assessed.

A good marketing plan puts a company on the business world’s map. This is why it is imperative to assess a marketing plan because it holds the power of how a company will appear to its customers. Below are four ways to evaluate your marketing Plan

  • Competitor Reaction - Your competition's reaction can often measure your marketing plan’s failure or success. Thus, keeping a close watch on whether your marketing campaign is being ignored or copied is advised. 
  • Customer Feedback - Customer is King! If your product does not appeal to your target audience, it is a sign to change your marketing strategy, and fast. Researching and accumulating data on what resonates with customers can give you an idea of what kind of efforts should go into developing a relevant marketing campaign for your product. 
  • Return - on - Investment - This term, or ROI, is considered crucial regarding marketing expenses. This concept checks the money being funneled into a marketing plan and whether it produces profit. It shows how much sales a particular marketing campaign brought in, leading to failure and success. 
  • Review Sales Numbers - Numbers never lie! One of the fastest ways to determine if your marketing plan is working. If your sales are considerably high after executing your marketing strategy, it means the plan worked and generated a natural response from consumers. 

What exactly does marketing plan evaluation entail?

A market evaluation refers to the research on any given industry; here, the term 'Market' has a broad meaning as it contains the number of people buying or selling a particular service or product and how they are engaged in it. In layperson's terms, the idea here is to examine the dynamics of the business area you are interested to trade in. Being grounded and having your ear to the ground is critical.

What are the marketing evaluation techniques?

Here is a checklist provided for you to determine the strength of your marketing plan:

  • Market Size
  • Pricing Potential
  • Customer Acquisition Cost
  • Value Delivery Cost
  • The originality of the product or service
  • Market Speed
  • Long Run Potential

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16.5: Ongoing Marketing Planning and Evaluation

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Learning Objectives

  • Apply marketing planning processes to ongoing business settings.
  • Identify the role of the marketing audit.

Our discussion so far might lead you to believe that a marketing plan is created only when a new offering is being launched. In reality, marketing plans are created frequently—sometimes on an annual basis, or when a new CMO is hired, when market dynamics change drastically and quickly, or just whenever a company’s CEO wants one. Moreover, as we indicated, a marketing plan should be something of a “living” document; it should contain triggers that result in a company reevaluating its strategies should different scenarios occur.

Some of those scenarios can occur immediately. For example, when a product is launched, the market reacts. Journalists begin to cover the phenomenon, competitors respond, and regulators may take note. What then should happen if the sales goals for the product are substantially exceeded? Should its price be raised or lowered? Should follow-on offerings be launched sooner? What if a competitor launches a similar offering a week later? Or worse yet, what if the competition launches a much better offering? The key to a successful ongoing marketing strategy is twofold: understanding causality and good execution of the marketing plan. Next we discuss each of these aspects.

Katie Scallan-Sarantakes

http://app.wistia.com/embed/medias/b1db0efe17

Katie Scallan-Sarantakes knows firsthand the difficulty of tracking the success of marketing activity. She describes some of those challenges here.

Causality is the relationship between two variables whereby one variable is a direct consequence of the other. For a scientist in a lab, identifying causality is fairly easy because the causal variable can be controlled and the consequences observed. For marketers, such control is a dream, not a reality. Identifying causality, then, can be a real challenge.

Why is causality so important? Assume you’ve observed a drop in sales that you think is caused by a competitor’s lower price. If you reduce your price to combat the competitor’s when, in reality, the poor sales are due simply to seasonal factors, lower prices might give consumers the impression that your product is cheap or low quality. This could send your sales even further downward. Drawing the wrong conclusions about causality can lead to disastrous results.

Control is an important related concept. Control , in this context, means not the degree to which you can manipulate an outcome but rather the degree to which you can separate the effects of a variable on a consequence. For example, you have complete control over what the customer pays for the offering. You are able to manipulate that outcome. However, you have no control over seasonal effects. Nonetheless, you can identify what those effects are and account for their influence.

The first type of control is managerial control , whereby you have control over how variables in a marketing plan are implemented. You decide, for example, how many stores will carry your product. You can vary that number and have an effect on sales. The second type of control is statistical control , whereby you can remove the influence of the variable on the outcome mathematically. For example, you have no control over seasonality. If you are selling a product for babies and more babies are born in August than any other month, then your sales will go up in September. Statistical control allows you to smooth out the seasonal variance on sales so you can then determine how much of the change in sales is due to other factors, especially those you have control over. Statistical control is something you learned in a regression class. However, the numbers in a statistical analysis can be as easily approximated. You don’t necessarily need to utilize complicated equations. Consider the following scenario:

  • Over the past five years, you have observed an average decline of 20 percent in sales for the months of June, July, and August, which also happen to be months in which many salespeople and buyers vacation.
  • This year, the decline was 28 percent.
  • You can therefore safely assume that about 20 percent of the decline this year was due to people taking vacations, as they have in years past; you can further assume that the amount of the decline due to factors other than vacations was about 8 percent.

Doing a simple analysis such as this at least gives you some idea that something new is going on that is lowering your sales. You can then explore the problem more completely.

So how do you figure out exactly what is the cause of such a decline? In some instances, marketing executives speculate about the potential causes of problems and then research them. For example, if the product’s price is perceived to be the problem, conversing with a number of former customers who switched to competing products could either verify this hunch or dispel it. In a B2B environment, salespeople who are aware of a competitor’s new lower prices might be the first to identify the problem, rather than marketing executives. Nonetheless, the firm’s marketing executives can then try to verify that lower prices led to the sales decline. In consumer-goods markets, there are often many segments of consumers. Rather than asking a few of them what they think, formal market research tools such as surveys and focus groups are used.

The Marketing Audit

Another investigative tool that can be used to research a drop in a company’s sales performance is a marketing audit. A marketing audit is an examination or snapshot of the state of a company’s marketing strategies as they are actually implemented. Here, managerial control becomes important. Was the strategy implemented as intended? Is the strategy working?

For example, when Xerox launched a new workstation, the company ran a promotion giving a customer who bought a workstation a discount on a copier. Despite the promotion, the overall sales of the workstation failed to meet Xerox’s expectations. There were, however, geographical areas in which the sales of the product were quite good. What was up?

Upon closer examination, Xerox’s managers learned that the firm’s salespeople in these areas had actually developed a much more effective selling strategy: they sold the copiers first and then offered the workstation for free by applying the amount of the discount to the workstation, not the copier. Xerox’s marketing quickly revamped the promotion and communicated it effectively to the rest of the sales staff.

Fidelity is the degree to which the plan is being implemented as it is supposed to be. In the example of the Xerox workstation, there was substantial fidelity—the plan was being implemented right—but the plan was poor. Usually, though, the problem is that the plan is not executed properly.

More serious issues require more in-depth study. When Mark Hurd took over as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO in 2005, he ordered an immediate audit of HP’s sales and marketing activities. Metrics such as the win/loss ratios of business deals, the length of time it took to get a proposal approved and presented to a customer, and other factors exposed numerous problems Hurd needed to fix. The audit identified the causes, many of which Hurd and his team were able to deal with quickly. As a result, HP increased market share and captured the lead in the PC market in the first year following Hurd’s appointment.

According to the marketing consulting company Copernicus, a marketing audit should assess many factors, but especially those listed below. Does any of the information surprise you?

Top Ten Factors a Marketing Audit Should Assess

  • Key factors that impacted the business for good or for bad during the past year.
  • Customer satisfaction scores and the number and type of customer complaints.
  • The satisfaction levels of distributors, retailers, and other value chain members.
  • The marketing knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction of all executives involved in the marketing function.
  • The extent to which the marketing program was marketed internally and “bought into” by top managers and nonmarketing executives.
  • The offering: Did it meet the customer’s needs as expected, and was the offering’s competitive advantage defensible?
  • The performance of the organization’s advertising, promotion, sales, marketing, and research programs with an emphasis on their return on the money invested in them.
  • Whether the marketing plan achieved its stated financial and nonfinancial goals.
  • Whether the individual elements of the marketing plan achieved their stated financial and nonfinancial goals.
  • The current value of the brand and customer equity for each brand in the product portfolio 1 .

You were probably surprised by a few items on the list. For example, did your marketing plan include a plan to market the marketing program to important internal parties, such as the company’s managers and employees? We discussed earlier that the marketing plan should persuade others to invest in the plan’s success. Part of that persuasion process could actually include a plan to communicate the plan! A marketing audit should assess the extent to which the plan was successful in achieving the goal of getting important people and departments within an organization to buy into the plan.

Do you think the “top ten” list above is prioritized correctly? Some people would argue that the first four or five factors that need to be examined are the most important. Other people would argue that only the financial factors (factors 7–10) matter. Which group is right?

The answer really depends on what’s important at the time to a company. Because HP hired Hurd to improve the company’s poor financial performance, financial issues were likely his top priority. He knew, however, that the causes of the poor financial performance probably lay elsewhere, so he had his team look deeper. Financial problems are usually the first to prompt a marketing audit.

Many firms don’t wait for problems before conducting an audit. Either they hire consultants like Copernicus Marketing Consulting to conduct the audit, or they do the audits themselves. If a firm’s budget doesn’t allow for a complete audit annually, the company will often focus on one particular area at a time, such as levels of satisfaction among its customers and channel partners. The following year it might audit the company’s communications strategy. Rotating the focus ensures that every aspect is audited regularly, if not annually.

http://app.wistia.com/embed/medias/f33fa6fb78

Marketing is a fun job, but it is more than that. Marketing professionals have to deliver business results with all of the work they do. As Katie Scallan-Sarantakes describes, you have to prove your ability to deliver value.

Key Takeaway

Review questions.

  • What is the difference between managerial control and statistical control? How is statistical control used?
  • What should a marketing audit accomplish?

1 “Marketing Audit: 10 Critical Components,” Copernicus Marketing Consulting, www.copernicusmarketing.com/o...rketing-audit/ (accessed April 13, 2012).

evaluation of marketing in business plan

10 Marketing Plan Examples to Inspire Your Campaigns

What do hiking a trail, driving to a friend’s house, and executing marketing campaigns all have in common? Each requires you to closely follow directions.

Directions are a critical part of our daily life. Used correctly, they can guide decision-making processes, make labor more efficient, and get where you want to go as quickly as possible. 

But failing to keep track of directions could cost you — and not just gas money. When it comes to marketing strategies, not having a clear goal tanks web traffic, dissipates brand interest, and costs companies across the United States a whopping $400 billion a year.

Designing a marketing plan is certainly no easy task, but it can be made easier with best practices, strategic tips, and concrete examples from successful businesses all over the world.

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What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic document that acts as a guide for marketing campaigns and strategies. These critical road maps detail where you are, where you’re going, and how you plan to get there.

The average marketing plan consists of seven major sections:

  • Writing an executive summary
  • Discussing the mission statement
  • Listing marketing objectives
  • Performing a SWOT analysis
  • Completing market research
  • Designing a market strategy
  • Determining a budget

The more detailed a marketing plan is, the more efficient it will be at accomplishing its goals. 

As you might imagine, marketers who bother to write a concrete marketing plan enjoy several benefits :

  • Organized marketers have a 674% higher chance of reporting success
  • Marketers who set goals are 377% more successful than those who don’t

It’s clear that a successful marketing plan opens pathways to other forms of business success — although the process is underutilized at best. More than three out of four small business owners lack an overarching marketing plan if they don’t have a clear path of growth. Creating a holistic marketing plan is absolutely necessary to scale brands at any level of development.

10 marketing plan examples from every industry

It’s much simpler to design a plan of action when the groundwork already exists. Below are 10 marketing plans sourced from real companies and brands around the world, highlighting unique approaches to researching, crafting and implementing a marketing strategy . 

1. Contently

Popular SaaS Contently developed a visual marketing plan for developing future campaigns. The strategy depicts its plan in a “waterfall” format, with goals blending into methods of application that eventually lead to success metrics. Although far more casual than other examples on this list, the work provides an excellent overview of a marketing plan’s necessary components.

Contently marketing plan

2. Visit Baton Rouge

The Baton Rouge area of Louisiana generates millions of dollars every year from tourism alone. The Visit Baton Rouge marketing plan was born from a need to better position the area and create long-term strategies for generating interest. This 38-page document goes into detail describing different destinations, events, and calendars, including recommended measurements for success.

Top marketing plan examples: Baton Rouge

Created by SaaS company HubSpot , this template includes a business summary, SWOT matrix, market strategy, budget, and other important aspects of a marketing plan. By filling it out, you can make informed decisions about your company’s positioning and your marketing in general.

HubSpot marketing plan

4. Evernote

Evernote provides a comprehensive marketing plan template for businesses of any size. Create a plan that walks through overviews, timelines, research, personas, and all other elements of an airtight campaign. If desired, you can also implement this template into your Evernote account to start developing a marketing plan almost immediately.

great examples of marketing plan: Evernote

5. University of Illinois

Even educational institutes need marketing plans. The University of Illinois created a very straightforward document that encapsulates its market context, research efforts, and current campaigns. Objectives and success metrics are completed in the third section, with about 40 pages overall. 

6. Monday.com

Monday.com is a project management platform providing in-house templates to all active users. This marketing plan offers various categories and subcategories that track project progress with data visualizations. Detailed objectives and KPIs can be identified in-app, including columns for a projected cost range.

Popular health and hygiene brand Lush released a comprehensive marketing plan walking through some products, positioning, and a marketing calendar for upcoming product releases. One of the highlights includes a detailed SWOT analysis with easy to read graphics. This is particularly helpful for brands in the personal care industry, among others.

Lush marketing plan

8. Coca-Cola

Industry titan Coca-Cola released a strategy video that encompasses all seven elements of a holistic marketing plan. The proposal primarily explains the major content initiatives for the coming year, and focuses on how the brand’s initial ideas can be practically implemented into the existing strategy. 

evaluation of marketing in business plan

9. Naperville Park District

Publicly funded recreational parks often have limited access to resources, which is why the Naperville Park District created a strategic marketing plan right at the beginning. This extremely detailed document walks through the company’s mission, situational analysis, strategy, and budget, on a micro-level.

nashville park marketing plan

10. Starbucks

Unlike the longform documents we’ve seen already, Starbucks takes a more concise approach. This six-page release details a strategy to elevate CX and brand ambassadors around the world. The marketing plan touches on individual strategies and tactics, as well as the methods used to ensure success. It’s important to note the detailed customer journey profiles that fit into a five-year strategy.

beverge marketing plan: starbucks

How to approach a marketing plan

Now that you know what a marketing plan looks like, it’s time to explore the initial stages of drafting and publishing your very first plan. Once you establish some basic starting points, a little research is all you need to get started.

Determine your goals

Directions simply don’t matter without an endpoint in mind. Craft some meaningful goals for your marketing campaign that envelop your brand’s values, objectives, and year-end plans. It’s best to use the SMART goal framework:

The more specific your goals are, the more effective your marketing plan will be.

Check your competitors

Staying abreast of your competitors and market share is critical in the early stages of a marketing plan. Using competitive analysis tools or an internal process, take some time to evaluate the approach that others are using — and how you can do better.

You might want to:

  • Perform a competitive analysis
  • Keep a close eye on industry news
  • Browse competitor social media content

Keep in mind that it’s possible to hire freelancers to perform competitive analysis for you, depending on your needs and time constraints.

Identify your audience

Understanding your target market — including their goals, ages, values, and demographics — is the golden rule of marketing. This can be done several ways, either by using data, creating personas, or outlying features in a document.

It’s best to consider everything that may be relevant to your audience in the marketing plan, including how products can be positioned in a way that makes them relevant. For example, a customer with a degree in IT would be more interested in ads that speak to their experience and industry pain points.

If you don’t have a target audience in mind yet, consider using programs like Google Analytics or in-platform insights from Facebook to identify specific segments.

Craft final KPIs

The difference between a good marketing plan and a great marketing plan starts with key performance metrics (KPIs). These will be used to measure the effectiveness of your campaign and provide detailed information about what worked, what didn’t, and what you can change in the future.

Every marketing plan should rely on its own unique set of metrics, all fitted to individual needs. If you’re looking for specific examples, you might want to try:

  • Raising the number of followers on a social media account
  • Generating a certain amount of website leads 
  • Achieving higher email open rates 

Keep in mind that your final metrics should adhere to the SMART method for best results.

Perform your revisions

The marketing plan is a living document and must be updated regularly to remain current. The average plan only has a shelf life of one to five years , on average, and should receive regular revisions in the meantime.

Take a closer look at your past goals, competitors, audience, and KPIs. Are any of these outdated or ill-aligned? What has changed for the company since its initial publication date? Make these adjustments accordingly (and hopefully with members of a team or committee).

Create marketing plans that guide your business well

It’s not enough to just write a marketing plan. In an increasingly competitive world of iron-clad strategies, marketing pros should take their time developing a plan that lasts. The above examples are a great place to start, especially as you craft an approach that is catered to your industry. 

Keep an eye on the growth of your business once your marketing plan hits the shelves. Continue to find new ways to optimize, refine, and otherwise make what you have even better than before. With an airtight marketing plan by your side, the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Want to learn more?

  • How to Create a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan
  • The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Influencer Marketing
  • 7 of the Best Landing Page Examples to Learn From
  • Instagram Marketing Tips to Shoot Up Your Sales

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How to Evaluate Your Small Business Marketing Plan

By Adam Aberback

As a small business owner, every resource you invest in your business is precious. Marketing is essential to grow brand awareness, generate leads, and connect with current customers. But how do you evaluate your small business marketing plan to see if your initiatives are working?

evaluation of marketing in business plan

Meaningful marketing results don’t happen overnight — it can sometimes take months to a year or more as awareness is building. Some types of marketing, like content marketing, may require a months-long investment in order to even begin to impact search engine results.

Regardless of how long or how quickly it takes to get results, you need to have measurement and tracking in place to make sure those efforts are achieving the desired results. Here’s a primer on how to evaluate and evolve your marketing efforts.

1. Calculate Return on Investment

To protect your time and money, you need to be able to calculate the return on investment of your marketing campaigns. Here is a simple formula for calculating marketing ROI :

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

You can apply this formula to all types of marketing campaigns. For example, say you ran Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ad campaigns for your business. You can look at the analytics of each ad campaign, see how many sales each one brought, and then apply the formula to calculate the ROI of each channel’s ad campaign. You may then choose to pause a channel’s ads, or apply what worked for one channel to the others.

Keep in mind that you need to confirm that sales growth came from that specific marketing campaign. In other words, if you can’t attribute the increase in sales to what you’re doing in marketing, this won’t work. Additionally, if you’re running several campaigns at once without any tracking in place, then it will be much more difficult to calculate ROI. If you’ve already been experiencing steady sales growth before you ran a marketing initiative, that average sales growth needs to be separated from your formula.

Also, you may want to edit this formula depending on what you want to measure. If you’re looking at increasing leads, then you’ll want to assign a dollar amount to the lead and replace sales growth with what those leads are worth.

For whatever ROI you’re measuring, you’ll want to use a reliable analytics tool, like Google Analytics, to track your leads’ and customers’ journeys. Before any marketing initiative, you need to first determine which metrics you want to measure that bring brand value, how you will measure those, and how long you will wait before measuring them.

2. Gather Customer Feedback

Another way to learn which marketing campaigns have been most successful is to talk with your customers. In addition to using your analytics tool, customer surveys can help you see what’s working and what you need to improve upon. Especially when you use offline marketing campaigns, you need to make sure they’re resonating with customers.

Although watching what your customers do is much more accurate than asking them what they would do or how they perceive your marketing efforts, asking them can add color to the results you’re seeing as your measure of how they interact with your marketing.

Customer feedback can be valuable because it gives you additional insight, and at the same time makes your customers feel valued, since you solicited their opinion.

Some ways to gather customer feedback on marketing initiatives include:

  • Send out an automated email survey that is triggered when customers interact with certain marketing campaigns.  There are a number of good email marketing tools to use for this.
  • Talk with customers on social media. Ask questions regarding campaigns. When an individual messages you, use that as an opportunity to gather additional feedback.
  • Create a customer survey contest. In exchange for participating in a survey, you might offer a cash or product reward. You can use a free survey tool like Google Forms or Survey Monkey to create the surveys.

Ask new customers how they heard about you. Regularly poll new and existing customers about what marketing campaigns they benefited from. This is also information you can capture at the time of sale.

Maybe it’s emailing offers. Or perhaps your customers are learning a lot from your new blog. Or, you might find that your target customers are really active on Instagram and Facebook but rarely use LinkedIn. Learning about your customers’ needs and wants will help you evolve your marketing campaigns.

3. Review Sales Growth

Because marketing results can be a cumulative effort across campaigns working in tandem, another way to evaluate your small business marketing plan is to see where your sales are today versus before you started any marketing efforts. If you’re selling significantly more today overall or in certain areas, that could be attributed to your marketing.

For example, say you ramped up local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in Quebec, and you see that sales there are increasingly significantly. You can apply those same SEO tactics to other parts of the country.

4. Ask for Partner Insights

As a busy small business owner, you may have outsourced marketing tactics to a freelancer or agency. The professional(s) you are paying for help should be providing real-time reports of your efforts. You should also ask them to provide competitor analysis and give you examples of how customers are reacting to your marketing campaigns. If you’re not currently getting those insights, ask for them now.

If you have a sales team, their feedback is also extremely valuable because they’re on the front lines with your customers. Anyone who works in customer service may also hear feedback about marketing campaigns. Make sure to train your staff to record any marketing campaign feedback they get, and regularly discuss your campaigns with your staff and outsourced help.

Track, Measure, Refine, and Repeat

Marketing is an ongoing business initiative that can bring you meaningful results. To be successful, you must:

  • Have a plan in place to track each marketing campaign.
  • Regularly review results.
  • Optimize campaigns through testing.
  • Gather feedback from customers, internal stakeholders, and outsourced partners to apply to marketing campaigns.

You need to consistently evaluate your small business marketing plan to maintain growth momentum and spend your dollars wisely. With a plan in place for each campaign, you can make smarter marketing decisions for your business. Looking to fuel growth by investing in some of these initiatives? A small business loan could get you the funds you need to expand your business.

Edited content. Originally published by OnDeck Capital and written by Katie Tregurtha.*

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16.4 Ongoing Marketing Planning and Evaluation

Learning objectives.

  • Apply marketing planning processes to ongoing business settings.
  • Identify the role of the marketing audit.

Our discussion so far might lead you to believe that a marketing plan is created only when a new offering is being launched. In reality, marketing plans are created frequently—sometimes on an annual basis, or when a new CMO is hired, when market dynamics change drastically and quickly, or just whenever a company’s CEO wants one. Moreover, as we indicated, a marketing plan should be something of a “living” document; it should contain triggers that result in a company reevaluating its strategies should different scenarios occur.

Some of those scenarios can occur immediately. For example, when a product is launched, the market reacts. Journalists begin to cover the phenomenon, competitors respond, and regulators may take note. What then should happen if the sales goals for the product are substantially exceeded? Should its price be raised or lowered? Should follow-on offerings be launched sooner? What if a competitor launches a similar offering a week later? Or worse yet, what if the competition launches a much better offering? The key to a successful ongoing marketing strategy is twofold: understanding causality and good execution of the marketing plan. Next we discuss each of these aspects.

Katie Scallan-Sarantakes

http://app.wistia.com/embed/medias/b1db0efe17

Katie Scallan-Sarantakes knows firsthand the difficulty of tracking the success of marketing activity. She describes some of those challenges here.

Causality is the relationship between two variables whereby one variable is a direct consequence of the other. For a scientist in a lab, identifying causality is fairly easy because the causal variable can be controlled and the consequences observed. For marketers, such control is a dream, not a reality. Identifying causality, then, can be a real challenge.

Why is causality so important? Assume you’ve observed a drop in sales that you think is caused by a competitor’s lower price. If you reduce your price to combat the competitor’s when, in reality, the poor sales are due simply to seasonal factors, lower prices might give consumers the impression that your product is cheap or low quality. This could send your sales even further downward. Drawing the wrong conclusions about causality can lead to disastrous results.

Control is an important related concept. Control , in this context, means not the degree to which you can manipulate an outcome but rather the degree to which you can separate the effects of a variable on a consequence. For example, you have complete control over what the customer pays for the offering. You are able to manipulate that outcome. However, you have no control over seasonal effects. Nonetheless, you can identify what those effects are and account for their influence.

The first type of control is managerial control , whereby you have control over how variables in a marketing plan are implemented. You decide, for example, how many stores will carry your product. You can vary that number and have an effect on sales. The second type of control is statistical control , whereby you can remove the influence of the variable on the outcome mathematically. For example, you have no control over seasonality. If you are selling a product for babies and more babies are born in August than any other month, then your sales will go up in September. Statistical control allows you to smooth out the seasonal variance on sales so you can then determine how much of the change in sales is due to other factors, especially those you have control over. Statistical control is something you learned in a regression class. However, the numbers in a statistical analysis can be as easily approximated. You don’t necessarily need to utilize complicated equations. Consider the following scenario:

  • Over the past five years, you have observed an average decline of 20 percent in sales for the months of June, July, and August, which also happen to be months in which many salespeople and buyers vacation.
  • This year, the decline was 28 percent.
  • You can therefore safely assume that about 20 percent of the decline this year was due to people taking vacations, as they have in years past; you can further assume that the amount of the decline due to factors other than vacations was about 8 percent.

Doing a simple analysis such as this at least gives you some idea that something new is going on that is lowering your sales. You can then explore the problem more completely.

So how do you figure out exactly what is the cause of such a decline? In some instances, marketing executives speculate about the potential causes of problems and then research them. For example, if the product’s price is perceived to be the problem, conversing with a number of former customers who switched to competing products could either verify this hunch or dispel it. In a B2B environment, salespeople who are aware of a competitor’s new lower prices might be the first to identify the problem, rather than marketing executives. Nonetheless, the firm’s marketing executives can then try to verify that lower prices led to the sales decline. In consumer-goods markets, there are often many segments of consumers. Rather than asking a few of them what they think, formal market research tools such as surveys and focus groups are used.

The Marketing Audit

Another investigative tool that can be used to research a drop in a company’s sales performance is a marketing audit. A marketing audit is an examination or snapshot of the state of a company’s marketing strategies as they are actually implemented. Here, managerial control becomes important. Was the strategy implemented as intended? Is the strategy working?

For example, when Xerox launched a new workstation, the company ran a promotion giving a customer who bought a workstation a discount on a copier. Despite the promotion, the overall sales of the workstation failed to meet Xerox’s expectations. There were, however, geographical areas in which the sales of the product were quite good. What was up?

Upon closer examination, Xerox’s managers learned that the firm’s salespeople in these areas had actually developed a much more effective selling strategy: they sold the copiers first and then offered the workstation for free by applying the amount of the discount to the workstation, not the copier. Xerox’s marketing quickly revamped the promotion and communicated it effectively to the rest of the sales staff.

Fidelity is the degree to which the plan is being implemented as it is supposed to be. In the example of the Xerox workstation, there was substantial fidelity—the plan was being implemented right—but the plan was poor. Usually, though, the problem is that the plan is not executed properly.

More serious issues require more in-depth study. When Mark Hurd took over as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO in 2005, he ordered an immediate audit of HP’s sales and marketing activities. Metrics such as the win/loss ratios of business deals, the length of time it took to get a proposal approved and presented to a customer, and other factors exposed numerous problems Hurd needed to fix. The audit identified the causes, many of which Hurd and his team were able to deal with quickly. As a result, HP increased market share and captured the lead in the PC market in the first year following Hurd’s appointment.

According to the marketing consulting company Copernicus, a marketing audit should assess many factors, but especially those listed below. Does any of the information surprise you?

Top Ten Factors a Marketing Audit Should Assess

  • Key factors that impacted the business for good or for bad during the past year.
  • Customer satisfaction scores and the number and type of customer complaints.
  • The satisfaction levels of distributors, retailers, and other value chain members.
  • The marketing knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction of all executives involved in the marketing function.
  • The extent to which the marketing program was marketed internally and “bought into” by top managers and nonmarketing executives.
  • The offering: Did it meet the customer’s needs as expected, and was the offering’s competitive advantage defensible?
  • The performance of the organization’s advertising, promotion, sales, marketing, and research programs with an emphasis on their return on the money invested in them.
  • Whether the marketing plan achieved its stated financial and nonfinancial goals.
  • Whether the individual elements of the marketing plan achieved their stated financial and nonfinancial goals.
  • The current value of the brand and customer equity for each brand in the product portfolio 1 .

You were probably surprised by a few items on the list. For example, did your marketing plan include a plan to market the marketing program to important internal parties, such as the company’s managers and employees? We discussed earlier that the marketing plan should persuade others to invest in the plan’s success. Part of that persuasion process could actually include a plan to communicate the plan! A marketing audit should assess the extent to which the plan was successful in achieving the goal of getting important people and departments within an organization to buy into the plan.

Do you think the “top ten” list above is prioritized correctly? Some people would argue that the first four or five factors that need to be examined are the most important. Other people would argue that only the financial factors (factors 7–10) matter. Which group is right?

The answer really depends on what’s important at the time to a company. Because HP hired Hurd to improve the company’s poor financial performance, financial issues were likely his top priority. He knew, however, that the causes of the poor financial performance probably lay elsewhere, so he had his team look deeper. Financial problems are usually the first to prompt a marketing audit.

Many firms don’t wait for problems before conducting an audit. Either they hire consultants like Copernicus Marketing Consulting to conduct the audit, or they do the audits themselves. If a firm’s budget doesn’t allow for a complete audit annually, the company will often focus on one particular area at a time, such as levels of satisfaction among its customers and channel partners. The following year it might audit the company’s communications strategy. Rotating the focus ensures that every aspect is audited regularly, if not annually.

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Marketing is a fun job, but it is more than that. Marketing professionals have to deliver business results with all of the work they do. As Katie Scallan-Sarantakes describes, you have to prove your ability to deliver value.

Key Takeaway

The key to a successful ongoing marketing strategy is twofold: understanding causality and good marketing plan execution. Drawing the wrong conclusions about causality, or what actually causes a change in a company’s sales performance, can lead to disastrous results. That’s why companies investigate the causes by gathering market feedback and conducting market research. Another tool that can be used to research a change in a company’s sales performance is a marketing audit. A marketing audit is an examination or a snapshot of the state of a company’s marketing strategies as they are actually implemented. Complete and partial audits can be done internally or by a consulting firm in order to find areas for improvement.

Review Questions

  • What is the difference between managerial control and statistical control? How is statistical control used?
  • What should a marketing audit accomplish?

1 “Marketing Audit: 10 Critical Components,” Copernicus Marketing Consulting, http://www.copernicusmarketing.com/our-thinking/blog/2011/07/20/10-critical-components-of-a-marketing-audit/ (accessed April 13, 2012).

Principles of Marketing Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Why Evaluation and Control are Essential Aspects of a Marketing Plan

Why Evaluation and Control are Essential Aspects of a Marketing Plan

Marketing plans are not just about strategies and tactics; they also encompass the critical aspects of evaluation and control. Evaluation and control are essential pillars of a comprehensive marketing plan, providing a mechanism to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing strategies and tactics. 

This understanding empowers you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your marketing plan for maximum effectiveness. In this way, evaluation and control are invaluable tools, enabling you to fine-tune your strategies, achieve optimal results, and stay ahead in the ever-evolving marketplace.

Significance of Evaluation and Control in Marketing Plans

Evaluation in marketing refers to the process of assessing the performance and effectiveness of marketing activities in achieving predetermined objectives. It involves analyzing data, metrics, and key performance indicators to determine the impact of marketing campaigns on the target audience and overall business goals. The importance of evaluation in marketing cannot be overstated. It provides valuable insights into what is working well and what can be improved upon in marketing strategies. By evaluating marketing efforts, businesses can identify trends, patterns, and areas for optimization to enhance their marketing performance and maximize return on investment.

Control in marketing strategies is essential for ensuring that marketing activities align with the objectives and goals outlined in the marketing plan. It involves monitoring and regulating marketing tactics to maintain consistency, quality, and effectiveness in reaching the target audience and driving desired outcomes. Having control of marketing strategies enables businesses to stay agile and responsive to changes in the market environment. By implementing control mechanisms, such as setting benchmarks, establishing performance metrics, and conducting regular reviews, businesses can track progress, identify deviations from the plan, and take corrective actions to steer marketing efforts in the right direction.

Incorporating Feedback Loops for Continuous Improvement

Feedback loops allow marketers to gather insights from various sources, such as customer feedback, social media interactions, and campaign performance metrics. By actively listening to customer responses and monitoring the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, businesses can adapt their strategies in real time to meet consumer needs.

Implementing feedback loops enables marketers to identify strengths and weaknesses in their campaigns, pinpoint areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. This iterative process of receiving, analyzing, and implementing feedback fosters continuous improvement and ensures that marketing strategies remain agile and responsive to changing market dynamics.

Utilizing feedback loops enhances the effectiveness of marketing campaigns while building stronger relationships with customers by demonstrating a commitment to meeting their evolving needs and preferences.

Outline of an Evaluation and Control Plan for a Marketing Plan

Below is an evaluation and control plan outline with sample metrics often incorporated into a marketing plan. Utilize this example to shape your evaluation and control measures for your marketing plan tailored to your industry, products, and services.

"Evaluation and control are essential aspects of the marketing plan for [Company Name] and its [insert product or service here]. They involve monitoring and assessing the performance of marketing activities to ensure they are on track and aligned with the set objectives. Here's an example of an evaluation and control plan:

Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define specific KPIs that align with the marketing objectives and strategies. These could include metrics such as:

Sales revenue and growth

Website traffic and conversions

Social media engagement (likes, shares, comments)

Lead generation and conversion rates

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer satisfaction and retention rates

Data Tracking and Analysis : Implement systems and tools to track and gather relevant data for performance evaluation. This could include:

Web analytics platforms to monitor website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates.

Social media analytics tools to track engagement metrics, reach, and audience demographics.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems to capture customer interactions and sales data.

Email marketing software to track open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Regular Reporting: Establish a reporting schedule to review marketing performance. Generate regular reports that provide insights into the progress and effectiveness of marketing activities. Include data on KPIs, campaign performance, audience engagement, and ROI. Share these reports with the marketing team, stakeholders, and relevant departments.

Evaluation Criteria: Define evaluation criteria for each marketing strategy or tactic. Assess their effectiveness based on predefined benchmarks or industry standards.  Digital Advertising Campaigns: Evaluate click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition compared to industry averages or previous campaigns.

Content Marketing: Measure engagement metrics, such as time spent on a page, social shares, and comments, to gauge content effectiveness.

Market Research and Competitor Analysis: Conduct periodic market research to understand the target market's evolving needs, preferences, and trends. Monitor competitor activities, marketing strategies, and customer feedback to identify opportunities or areas for improvement. Continuous Optimization: Use the evaluation findings to optimize marketing strategies and tactics. Identify areas of underperformance or missed opportunities and make necessary adjustments. This could involve reallocating resources, refining messaging, or exploring new marketing channels. Feedback and Collaboration: Encourage open communication within the marketing team and with other departments, such as sales and customer support. Seek input and insights from team members and stakeholders to identify potential areas of improvement or new marketing opportunities. Budget Review: Regularly review the marketing budget and compare actual spending against planned allocations. Assess the ROI of marketing activities and adjust the budget as needed.

Adjusting the Marketing Plan: Based on evaluation results, make informed decisions on whether to maintain, modify, or discontinue specific marketing strategies or tactics. Update the marketing plan as necessary to reflect the evolving market landscape and business objectives.

By implementing a robust evaluation and control plan, [Company Name] can effectively measure the success of its marketing efforts, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize the marketing plan for [insert product or service here]."

Download the Evaluation and Control Plan Template

Ready to kickstart your marketing planning process and create a roadmap for success? Download our free Create a Marketing Plan template to implement evaluation and control into your strategy! This customizable template will guide you through the essential components of a comprehensive marketing plan, ensuring you cover all crucial aspects effectively.  Don't let this valuable resource slip through your fingers - seize the opportunity to make significant strides toward accomplishing your marketing goals by downloading our complimentary template today!

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Marketing Evaluating and Controlling

Marketing Evaluating And Controlling

Marketing is a complex activity. It involves many options, it requires coordination among many functions and tasks, and it must respond to changes in customers and competitors. These factors make planning difficult and often make the achievement of a marketing strategy or program even more problematic. Without good control and evaluation procedures, even the best marketing effort could produce unexpected and often undesirable results.

Meanings and Purposes of Control and Evaluation

The terms control and evaluation are often used with the same meaning, but they can be distinguished. Control is “the feedback process that helps the manager learn (1) how ongoing plans are working and (2) how to plan for the future”.

Control means keeping on target. Control occurs while an activity or project is in progress, and managers are informed immediately when any significant deviation from objectives is detected or even suspected so that corrective action can be taken.

Evaluation involves reviewing the results from a program or activity to determine how well-intended objectives were achieved.

Evaluation is sometimes considered more diagnostic than control because evaluation attempts to explain the reasons for results. But in a practical sense, control and evaluation are closely related and often hard to separate since they aim to better performance.

The essence of evaluation is obtaining relevant information for gauging performance. Marketing executives are continually monitoring performance, and often they must revise their strategies to cope with changing conditions.

To ensure the marketing program’s effective operation, some form of program evaluation needs to be conducted periodically. Marketers cannot afford to leave their performance to chance since the company’s very survival may depend on the program’s success or failure.

To achieve marketing objectives and general organizational objectives, marketing managers must control marketing activities effectively.

The marketing control process consists of establishing performance standards, evaluating actual performance by comparing it with established standards and reducing the differences between desired and actual performance.

The success of marketing plans frequently depends on the level of execution achieved by the salespeople, dealers, and advertising agencies who implement programs in the real world. Business firms must have a control system that quickly points out execution errors and helps managers take corrective action.

The purposes and areas of evaluation are shown in the following table:

This classification represents the major strategic evaluation activities that occur in any firm. As indicated, there are three reasons for the evaluation. The evaluation types listed in the exhibit are accomplished in the areas of evaluation where Xs have been placed.

Steps Taken in Establishing an Evaluation Program

The major steps that must be taken in establishing an evaluation program are discussed below:

To compare actual performance with performance standards, marketing managers must know what marketers within the company are doing and have information about external organizations’ activities that provide the firm with marketing assistance.

Information is required about marketing personnel’s activities at the operations level and various marketing management levels.

Most businesses obtain marketing assistance from external individuals or organizations, such as advertising agencies, intermediaries, marketing research firms, and consultants.

To acquire the most benefit from external sources, a marketing control process must monitor their activities. Although it may be difficult to obtain the necessary information, it is impossible to measure actual performance.

Records of actual performance are compared with performance standards to determine whether and how much discrepancy exists. For example, a salesperson’s actual sales are compared with their sales quota to determine how much difference exists.

If a significant negative discrepancy exists, the marketing manager takes corrective action. In some organizations, electronic data processing equipment enhances a marketing manager’s ability to evaluate actual performance.

Determining What Performance to Evaluate

Despite the importance of evaluations, they are often done on a very informal and haphazard basis. Though time and money may be saved, these approaches to evaluate rarely are useful. They tend to be inaccurate, overly superficial, or too late to help the marketer determine whether corrective actions are required.

To properly evaluate the marketing activities, the executive should conduct a marketing audit, a formal and systematic performance analysis of some or all of the marketing mix elements .

It can also be defined as a systematic examination of a firm’s marketing unit’s objectives, strategies, organization, and performance. The differences between an audit and haphazard evaluations are the preplanning and formality the audit brings to the evaluative process.

Though a marketing audit’s magnitude and frequency will depend on the executive’s particular needs, the thoroughness and overall quality will not. Thus, the marketing executive is likely to obtain more accurate and complete information and better ensure the success of the marketing program.

Basically, marketing audits are conducted for the following two purposes.

  • to analyze an on-going marketing program to ensure that the product objectives are achieved; and
  • to review a completed marketing program to assess its overall effectiveness.

Control audits are those conducted to monitor the progress of a marketing program. They are designed to help the marketing executive identify and correct any deviations from the planned activities.

Review audits are used to appraise a marketing program’s past performance, such as audits, which are used to obtain historical data that may prove beneficial in future planning.

A marketer should monitor every activity continuously. To ensure that the elements of the mix are working properly.

However, the costs of making a comprehensive analysis can be very high. Therefore, a marketer usually does not evaluate all facets every time an audit is made, except when a review audit is conducted.

While conducting a review, an analysis of all areas is made, although it may not be as detailed an examination. On the other hand, in the case of control audits, only a select few elements will be examined at any one time.

In evaluating a marketing program, a marketer includes such areas as the marketing mix demands and the target market . Like the marketing organization and the research activities, other issues are also occasionally the subject of evaluation.

Subject to the time, budgetary constraints, and the executive’s needs, an entire area or some of its components will be the evaluation program’s focal point.

For reducing the scope of the evaluation, the marketing executive must include those aspects that are most important for his business and have significant impacts on future growth.

Marketing Control Process – Controlling Marketing Activities

No management process can be completed without control. Marketing control , you know, is the process of evaluating achieved results against established standards and of taking corrective action to exploit opportunities or solve problems.

Planning and controlling are closely interrelated because plans include statements about what to be accomplished.

For purposes of control, these statements function as performance standards. A performance standard is an expected level of performance against which actual performance can be compared.

Examples of performance standards might be reducing customers’ complaints by 50 percent, a monthly sales quota of $100,000, or a 20 percent increase per month in new customer accounts.

The Control Process

The control process involves evaluating results against objectives. Although this stage of the process is crucial, it tells us if we have met, exceeded, or fallen short of objectives. Perhaps the most creative aspect of control involves establishing why those results were achieved and what we should do in response – in other words, what, if any, corrective action should we take.

Marketing Control Process

For example, suppose that Mr. Ali, the marketing manager for a division of a pharmaceutical company, has established a sales objective of $5 million for the year. The first quarter’s goal was $1.5 million, but the results reported by the accounting department show sales of only $1 million.

Therefore, Mr. Ali will have to take a hard look at the planning process’s assumptions and how the marketing plan has been implemented.

He will look for data on total industry sales compared with those forecast by the pharmaceutical industry. He will reevaluate the company’s plan to add salespeople and probably a dozen other marketing plan aspects.

The results of all this effort may lead Mr. Ali and other executives to the conclusion that environmental factors have depressed the industry and that the original objective of $5 million is no longer realistic. If that is the case, they may revise the planned objectives accordingly.

However, their study may reveal that the industry is doing well and that the problem is more specific to their firm. Perhaps the sales department has failed to add salespeople as planned and, in fact, has failed to replace some who have quit or retired.

In this case, a mid­course correction might be in order. The firm may wish to hire a new sales manager who will be more successful at replacing personnel. Still, a third conclusion may be reached.

The original marketing plan may be found to be valid. The $0.5 million shortfalls in sales may be simply a technical problem. Clearly, these are essential parts of the control process. Managers must not only measure the results but also decide what to do about them.

Now that you are familiar with marketing evaluating and controlling; explore complete guideline on marketing management .

  • Marketing Information System (MIS): Meaning, Tasks, Components
  • Identifying & Assessing Business Competitors: Strategies, Objectives, Strengths & Weaknesses
  • Marketing Control: Types of Marketing Control
  • 4 Types of Competitors: Unleash Competitive Advantage
  • Marketing Intelligence System: Improve Decision-Making
  • Market Challenger Strategies
  • New Product Development: Definition, Process
  • 5 Marketing Concepts: Marketing Management Philosophies
  • Societal Marketing Concept: Definition, Advantages, Examples
  • 5 Stages of Consumer Adoption Process [Buyer Decision Process for New Products]
  • Product Line Decisions
  • Sales Forecasting: Effective Methods, Analysis, & Techniques
  • Product Mix Decisions
  • Market Evolution: Definition, Stages of Market Evolution
  • Marketing Process: 5 Steps of Marketing Process

Business News Daily

6 Tips for Creating a Great Business Marketing Plan

E very successful company needs a well-thought-out business plan to outline its course of action. A marketing strategy is one key part of that plan: It spells out critical information, including how a business will distinguish itself from competitors and what the team will aim to achieve.

While marketing plans don't always produce immediate results, they are still a crucial aspect of a business plan and should be given a considerate amount of attention. A complete and effective marketing strategy can reveal opportunities through new audience segments, changes in pricing strategy or by differentiating the brand from the competition.

Here's how to create an effective marketing plan for your business. 

How to develop a business marketing plan

A focused marketing plan sets two goals. The first is to maintain engagement and customer loyalty , and the second is to capture market share within a specific audience segment of your target audience.

Your marketing plan outlines the strategies you'll use to achieve both goals and the specific actions your marketing team will employ, such as the specific outreach campaigns, over which channels they will occur, the required marketing budget and data-driven projections of their success.

Marketing is a science-driven commitment that typically requires months of data to refine campaigns, and an interconnected marketing plan keeps your business committed to its long-term goals. 

All marketing guidelines will circle back to the four P's: product, price, place and promotion. The following tips are starting points that will ingrain the habit of continually returning to these four P's.

1. Create an executive summary.

Marketing campaigns should not be considered individual functions. Marketing is the story of your brand as told to customers; like any narrative, its tone and characters should remain consistent. An executive summary details your marketing goals for the next year and helps tie each campaign together. 

When establishing your marketing goals, they should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound – or SMART. These goals should work together to achieve both internal and external harmony, telling a consistent story that informs customers of your exact message while building on its previous chapters. 

For example, you may set a SMART goal to increase your company's social media traffic by 15% in a 90-day time frame, and plan to achieve this by creating four relevant, informative and high-quality posts per week on each platform, using your company's brand kit. 

2. Identify your target market.

Before you write a marketing plan, you need to find and understand your niche. Ask yourself who the specific demographic is that you're targeting. For example, if your business sells 30-minute meals, then those who work traditional 9-to-5 jobs are likely in your market. Study that group of individuals to understand their struggles and learn how your business can solve the problem.

FYI: Targeting your audience can drastically improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and help you avoid wasting resources on fruitless campaigns.

3. Differentiate your brand with inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing utilizes internal tools – such as content marketing, social media activity and search engine optimization (SEO) – to attract a customer's attention primarily through online communication. Content marketing can include informative blog posts, interviews, podcasts with relevant industry figures or supplementary guides on how to best use your product. For example, if you sell cooking supplies, consider posting several fun recipes around the holidays that your tools can help prepare.

Each of these strategies empowers the others in a loop to achieve greater customer attention. A strong content offering can improve your search engine ranking, which brings more people to your website and social pages. You can then share those developed content pieces to that wider audience, who will again improve your search engine rankings. All of this can be done without the expense of a famous endorser or commercial advertising campaign. 

4. Identify competitors that also target your customers.

No matter how original your product or service may be, there is always competition for your target customer's dollar. Small business personnel seldom take the time to study their competitors in-depth or pinpoint companies outside their industry that are just as capable of luring customers away. Knowing who your competitors are, their core competitive advantages, and how they might respond to your offerings – like price cuts or increased communication – helps you devise strategies to combat such losses. 

By seeking out these competitors, you can develop ways to differentiate your business by providing consumers with the things they may be lacking from your competition. Observe how your competitors operate to find ways in which you can stand out and steer your target audience toward your business. 

Did you know? According to SmallBizGenius, 19% of small businesses fail because of their competitors. 

5. State your brand position for your target customers.

Ultimately, your brand – and what it symbolizes for customers – is your strongest advantage. You should be able to write a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements focus on solving a problem for the customer in a way that promotes the best value.

6. Budget the plan. 

When implementing a strategy, consider the marketing budget you will allot. Marketing requires money for various reasons, including paid promotions, marketing software, events and outsourced costs. Consider your budget when creating the plan so that there is money available to spend on marketing tactics to achieve your goals. 

While drafting the plan and evaluating your course of action, note the estimated cost, assets, and time required to achieve the stated goals; this will help when it comes time to set the actual calculated budget. Any goals that you create should be realistically achievable within the budget you have set. 

Key takeaway: When developing your marketing plan, you should know why a customer would use your product, differentiate your brand from competitors, and audit your product offering and message to ensure consistency.

Channels to include in your marketing plan

Once you know the elements of your plan, the next step is to develop the blueprint of how you will reach your target customers. Aside from traditional print and broadcast media, here are three digital marketing channels that many business owners utilize.

Social media

Social media is an essential part of businesses' marketing plans, because every type of customer is on some type of platform – such as Facebook , Twitter or LinkedIn . You may feel overwhelmed at the possibilities, but focus on the sites that can benefit your business the most.

Brett Farmiloe, founder of internet marketing company Markitors, advised companies starting out in social media to get to know their customers and the platforms they use.

"Figure out where your customers are spending their time, and set up shop on those platforms," he told Business News Daily. "Develop a content strategy that can be executed internally, [and then] execute your strategy by posting branded content on your selected platforms."

Though email marketing is not as new as social media marketing, it is an effective and popular choice for small business owners. Companies can implement email marketing techniques in many ways, including newsletters, promotional campaigns and transactional emails. For instance, Mailchimp and Constant Contact help companies manage their email drip campaigns .

Farmiloe added to set your email marketing efforts apart from the others by segmenting your markets.

"Not all subscribers want to receive the same blast," he said. "Smart email marketers take the time to segment subscribers at the outset, and then continue to segment based on subscriber activity. Through segmentation, companies reduce the amount of unsubscribes, increase open rates and, most importantly, increase the amount of actions taken from an email send."

The popularity of smartphones and tablets has changed how companies target consumers. Since people have these devices with them nearly all the time, companies are looking to implement strategies that reach customers on their gadgets.   

"Mobile marketing is interruptive," Farmiloe said. "It's because of this power that a marketer has to let the consumer determine how and when to receive marketing material. That's why almost every app comes with the option to turn notifications on or off. The consumer has to hold the power with mobile marketing."

Key takeaway: Use digital marketing channels – such as social media, email and mobile – to reach customers, but only after researching each channel in depth and developing a strategy to capture consumers' interest. 

Monitoring results

Well-defined budgets, goals and action items – with appropriate personnel assigned to each – can make your marketing plan a reality. Think about how much you're willing to spend, the outcomes you expect and the necessary tasks to achieve those outcomes.

Analytical tools that track customer behavior and engagement rates can serve as a helpful guide for your marketing strategy . Unlike billboards or commercials, digital channels allow you to assess each step of the customer journey and gain insights on the individual patterns and intent of prospects. Intention can soon develop into prediction, empowering your marketing team to develop campaigns that consistently reach target audiences at the right time. 

You can find more tips for measuring your marketing ROI here.

Jordan Beier and Adryan Corcione contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.

Every successful company needs a well-thought-out business plan to outline its course of action. A marketing strategy is

College of Nursing

Driving change: a case study of a dnp leader in residence program in a gerontological center of excellence.

View as pdf A later version of this article appeared in Nurse Leader , Volume 21, Issue 6 , December 2023 . 

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) published the Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Practice Nursing in 2004 identifying the essential curriculum needed for preparing advanced practice nurse leaders to effectively assess organizations, identify systemic issues, and facilitate organizational changes. 1 In 2021, AACN updated the curriculum by issuing The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education to guide the development of competency-based education for nursing students. 1 In addition to AACN’s competency-based approach to curriculum, in 2015 the American Organization of Nurse Leaders (AONL) released Nurse Leader Core Competencies (updated in 2023) to help provide a competency based model to follow in developing nurse leaders. 2

Despite AACN and AONL competency-based curriculum and model, it is still common for nurse leaders to be promoted to management positions based solely on their work experience or exceptional clinical skills, rather than demonstration of management and leadership competencies. 3 The importance of identifying, training, and assessing executive leaders through formal leadership development programs, within supportive organizational cultures has been discussed by national leaders. As well as the need for nurturing emerging leaders through fostering interprofessional collaboration, mentorship, and continuous development of leadership skills has been identified. 4 As Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) nurse leaders assume executive roles within healthcare organizations, they play a vital role within complex systems. Demonstration of leadership competence and participation in formal leadership development programs has become imperative for their success. However, models of competency-based executive leadership development programs can be hard to find, particularly programs outside of health care systems.

The implementation of a DNP Leader in Residence program, such as the one designed for The Barbara and Richard Csomay Center for Gerontological Excellence, addresses many of the challenges facing new DNP leaders and ensures mastery of executive leadership competencies and readiness to practice through exposure to varied experiences and close mentoring. The Csomay Center , based at The University of Iowa, was established in 2000 as one of the five original Hartford Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence in the country. Later funding by the Csomay family established an endowment that supports the Center's ongoing work. The current Csomay Center strategic plan and mission aims to develop future healthcare leaders while promoting optimal aging and quality of life for older adults. The Csomay Center Director created the innovative DNP Leader in Residence program to foster the growth of future nurse leaders in non-healthcare systems. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of the development and implementation of the Leader in Residence program, followed by suggested evaluation strategies, and discussion of future innovation of leadership opportunities in non-traditional health care settings.

Development of the DNP Leader in Residence Program

The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle has garnered substantial recognition as a valuable tool for fostering development and driving improvement initiatives. 5 The PDSA cycle can function as an independent methodology and as an integral component of broader quality enhancement approaches with notable efficacy in its ability to facilitate the rapid creation, testing, and evaluation of transformative interventions within healthcare. 6 Consequently, the PDSA cycle model was deemed fitting to guide the development and implementation of the DNP Leader in Residence Program at the Csomay Center.

PDSA Cycle: Plan

Existing resources. The DNP Health Systems: Administration/Executive Leadership Program offered by the University of Iowa is comprised of comprehensive nursing administration and leadership curriculum, led by distinguished faculty composed of national leaders in the realms of innovation, health policy, leadership, clinical education, and evidence-based practice. The curriculum is designed to cultivate the next generation of nursing executive leaders, with emphasis on personalized career planning and tailored practicum placements. The DNP Health Systems: Administration/Executive Leadership curriculum includes a range of courses focused on leadership and management with diverse topics such as policy an law, infrastructure and informatics, finance and economics, marketing and communication, quality and safety, evidence-based practice, and social determinants of health. The curriculum is complemented by an extensive practicum component and culminates in a DNP project with additional hours of practicum.

New program. The DNP Leader in Residence program at the Csomay Center is designed to encompass communication and relationship building, systems thinking, change management, transformation and innovation, knowledge of clinical principles in the community, professionalism, and business skills including financial, strategic, and human resource management. The program fully immerses students in the objectives of the DNP Health Systems: Administration/Executive Leadership curriculum and enables them to progressively demonstrate competencies outlined by AONL. The Leader in Residence program also includes career development coaching, reflective practice, and personal and professional accountability. The program is integrated throughout the entire duration of the Leader in Residence’s coursework, fulfilling the required practicum hours for both the DNP coursework and DNP project.

The DNP Leader in Residence program begins with the first semester of practicum being focused on completing an onboarding process to the Center including understanding the center's strategic plan, mission, vision, and history. Onboarding for the Leader in Residence provides access to all relevant Center information and resources and integration into the leadership team, community partnerships, and other University of Iowa College of Nursing Centers associated with the Csomay Center. During this first semester, observation and identification of the Csomay Center Director's various roles including being a leader, manager, innovator, socializer, and mentor is facilitated. In collaboration with the Center Director (a faculty position) and Center Coordinator (a staff position), specific competencies to be measured and mastered along with learning opportunities desired throughout the program are established to ensure a well-planned and thorough immersion experience.

Following the initial semester of practicum, the Leader in Residence has weekly check-ins with the Center Director and Center Coordinator to continue to identify learning opportunities and progression through executive leadership competencies to enrich the experience. The Leader in Residence also undertakes an administrative project for the Center this semester, while concurrently continuing observations of the Center Director's activities in local, regional, and national executive leadership settings. The student has ongoing participation and advancement in executive leadership roles and activities throughout the practicum, creating a well-prepared future nurse executive leader.

After completing practicum hours related to the Health Systems: Administration/Executive Leadership coursework, the Leader in Residence engages in dedicated residency hours to continue to experience domains within nursing leadership competencies like communication, professionalism, and relationship building. During residency hours, time is spent with the completion of a small quality improvement project for the Csomay Center, along with any other administrative projects identified by the Center Director and Center Coordinator. The Leader in Residence is fully integrated into the Csomay Center's Leadership Team during this phase, assisting the Center Coordinator in creating agendas and leading meetings. Additional participation includes active involvement in community engagement activities and presenting at or attending a national conference as a representative of the Csomay Center. The Leader in Residence must mentor a master’s in nursing student during the final year of the DNP Residency.

Implementation of the DNP Leader in Residence Program

PDSA Cycle: Do

Immersive experience. In this case study, the DNP Leader in Residence was fully immersed in a wide range of center activities, providing valuable opportunities to engage in administrative projects and observe executive leadership roles and skills during practicum hours spent at the Csomay Center. Throughout the program, the Leader in Residence observed and learned from multidisciplinary leaders at the national, regional, and university levels who engaged with the Center. By shadowing the Csomay Center Director, the Leader in Residence had the opportunity to observe executive leadership objectives such as fostering innovation, facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration, and nurturing meaningful relationships. The immersive experience within the center’s activities also allowed the Leader in Residence to gain a deep understanding of crucial facets such as philanthropy and community engagement. Active involvement in administrative processes such as strategic planning, budgeting, human resources management, and the development of standard operating procedures provided valuable exposure to strategies that are needed to be an effective nurse leader in the future.

Active participation. The DNP Leader in Residence also played a key role in advancing specific actions outlined in the center's strategic plan during the program including: 1) the creation of a membership structure for the Csomay Center and 2) successfully completing a state Board of Regents application for official recognition as a distinguished center. The Csomay Center sponsored membership for the Leader in Residence in the Midwest Nurse Research Society (MNRS), which opened doors to attend the annual MNRS conference and engage with regional nursing leadership, while fostering socialization, promotion of the Csomay Center and Leader in Residence program, and observation of current nursing research. Furthermore, the Leader in Residence participated in the strategic planning committee and engagement subcommittee for MNRS, collaborating directly with the MNRS president. Additional active participation by the Leader in Residence included attendance in planning sessions and completion of the annual report for GeriatricPain.org , an initiative falling under the umbrella of the Csomay Center. Finally, the Leader in Residence was involved in archiving research and curriculum for distinguished nursing leader and researcher, Dr. Kitty Buckwalter, for the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, the University of Pennsylvania Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, and the University of Iowa library archives.

Suggested Evaluation Strategies of the DNP Leader in Residence Program

PDSA Cycle: Study

Assessment and benchmarking. To effectively assess the outcomes and success of the DNP Leader in Residence Program, a comprehensive evaluation framework should be used throughout the program. Key measures should include the collection and review of executive leadership opportunities experienced, leadership roles observed, and competencies mastered. The Leader in Residence is responsible for maintaining detailed logs of their participation in center activities and initiatives on a semester basis. These logs serve to track the progression of mastery of AONL competencies by benchmarking activities and identifying areas for future growth for the Leader in Residence.

Evaluation. In addition to assessment and benchmarking, evaluations need to be completed by Csomay Center stakeholders (leadership, staff, and community partners involved) and the individual Leader in Residence both during and upon completion of the program. Feedback from stakeholders will identify the contributions made by the Leader in Residence and provide valuable insights into their growth. Self-reflection on experiences by the individual Leader in Residence throughout the program will serve as an important measure of personal successes and identify gaps in the program. Factors such as career advancement during the program, application of curriculum objectives in the workplace, and prospects for future career progression for the Leader in Residence should be considered as additional indicators of the success of the program.

The evaluation should also encompass a thorough review of the opportunities experienced during the residency, with the aim of identifying areas for potential expansion and enrichment of the DNP Leader in Residence program. By carefully examining the logs, reflecting on the acquired executive leadership competencies, and studying stakeholder evaluations, additional experiences and opportunities can be identified to further enhance the program's efficacy. The evaluation process should be utilized to identify specific executive leadership competencies that require further immersion and exploration throughout the program.

Future Innovation of DNP Leader in Residence Programs in Non-traditional Healthcare Settings

PDSA Cycle: Act

As subsequent residents complete the program and their experiences are thoroughly evaluated, it is essential to identify new opportunities for DNP Leader in Residence programs to be implemented in other non-health care system settings. When feasible, expansion into clinical healthcare settings, including long-term care and acute care environments, should be pursued. By leveraging the insights gained from previous Leaders in Residence and their respective experiences, the program can be refined to better align with desired outcomes and competencies. These expansions will broaden the scope and impact of the program and provide a wider array of experiences and challenges for future Leaders in Residency to navigate, enriching their development as dynamic nurse executive leaders within diverse healthcare landscapes.

This case study presented a comprehensive overview of the development and implementation of the DNP Leader in Residence program developed by the Barbara and Richard Csomay Center for Gerontological Excellence. The Leader in Residence program provided a transformative experience by integrating key curriculum objectives, competency-based learning, and mentorship by esteemed nursing leaders and researchers through successful integration into the Center. With ongoing innovation and application of the PDSA cycle, the DNP Leader in Residence program presented in this case study holds immense potential to help better prepare 21 st century nurse leaders capable of driving positive change within complex healthcare systems.

Acknowledgements

         The author would like to express gratitude to the Barbara and Richard Csomay Center for Gerontological Excellence for the fostering environment to provide an immersion experience and the ongoing support for development of the DNP Leader in Residence program. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

  • American Association of Colleges of Nursing. The essentials: core competencies for professional nursing education. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/42/AcademicNursing/pdf/Essentials-2021.pdf . Accessed June 26, 2023.
  • American Organization for Nursing Leadership. Nurse leader core competencies. https://www.aonl.org/resources/nurse-leader-competencies . Accessed July 10, 2023.
  • Warshawsky, N, Cramer, E. Describing nurse manager role preparation and competency: findings from a national study. J Nurs Adm . 2019;49(5):249-255. DOI:  10.1097/NNA.0000000000000746
  • Van Diggel, C, Burgess, A, Roberts, C, Mellis, C. Leadership in healthcare education. BMC Med. Educ . 2020;20(465). doi: 10.1186/s12909-020-02288-x
  • Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Plan-do-study-act (PDSA) worksheet. https://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/Tools/PlanDoStudyActWorksheet.aspx . Accessed July 4, 2023.
  • Taylor, M, McNicolas, C, Nicolay, C, Darzi, A, Bell, D, Reed, J. Systemic review of the application of the plan-do-study-act method to improve quality in healthcare. BMJ Quality & Safety. 2014:23:290-298. doi: 10.1136/bmjqs-2013-002703

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