How to Plan an Effective Marketing Strategy: Start With a Review

Emily Sidley — August 10, 2018 Follow @EmilySidleyPR

As fall approaches, many businesses are starting to look ahead and plan their marketing strategy for 2019. What marketing initiatives will you use in during the coming year?

How to Measure Marketing Strategy Success

Before you can figure out where you’re going, you need to start with where you are. What were your goals from this last year? Did you achieve them?

Pull up as many analytics as possible. At Three Girls, we rely on data from sources such as:

• Google Analytics
  
• MailChimp (our email marketing platform)
  
• Social Media Analytics (e.g. Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc)

Think about all the marketing tactics you’ve used over the past year and look for as much data as possible about them.

As you look at the analytics available, think about your marketing strategy’s goals. Were you hoping to increase website traffic by a certain percentage? Pull up Google Analytics, set it to compare the current quarter to the same quarter of last year, and compare the difference between the two of them. This will tell you if you achieved the goal.

Do the same sort of comparison for any other goals you wrote down for your 2018 marketing strategy. Since the year isn’t over yet, there may still be some areas to improve before December, but as we’re already halfway through you might already be starting to get a feel for which goals you did or are likely to achieve, and which you didn’t or aren’t like to reach.

Establishing Analytics for Next Year’s Marketing Strategy

If you haven’t taken the time to set up your analytics accounts, now is a great time to begin collecting some baseline data:

• Set up a Google Analytics account so you can measure your website traffic.
  
• Export and review analytics from your social media accounts so you have data saved showing your engagement, followers, click-through rates, etc.
  
• Make sure you know where to find analytics for any other tactics in your marketing strategy, such as your e-newsletter data, social media ads, etc.

Once you have your analytics available, you’ll be able to create your 2019 marketing strategy around goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely).

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