A well-planned marketing strategy is essential for any business looking to grow and succeed. By taking the time to consider a marketing plan, businesses can define their goals and objectives, identify target customers, and plan strategies to reach them. However, creating a successful marketing plan is not a one-time task: it is important to continually evaluate and adjust the plan as needed. One of the most important aspects of marketing plan evaluation is to consider the controls that can be put in place to ensure that all strategies are successful. In this blog post, we will discuss the importance of controls in a marketing plan and how to incorporate them to ensure your business reaches its goals.
Marketing Plan Implementation and Control
Importance of marketing plan controls
Controls over a marketing plan are crucial because they enable you to raise a company’s performance, which can help it better achieve its objectives. It can also aid in boosting a marketing plan’s return on investment. Controls are necessary for monitoring the effectiveness and progress of a marketing strategy. After performing a SWOT analysis of the business, you could develop a marketing strategy. You can use a SWOT analysis template to examine a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in more detail while evaluating its competitors. A closer look at each of the SWOT components that you can use to help develop your controls is provided below:
What are controls in marketing plans?
Controls in marketing plans are metrics that let you assess how an organization is doing in relation to the objectives and strategies outlined in the marketing plan. Having controls to monitor enables you to make sure the business is on track to achieve its objectives. Reviewing your own and the business’s performance over the previous year will help. From there, you can decide what modifications to the marketing strategy are necessary to better align it with the company’s overall goals. Additionally, you can use a marketing plan’s controls to assist sales teams in determining the company’s projection.
Examples of controls in marketing plans
Here are some examples of marketing plan controls:
Consumer feedback
Consideration of and application of customer feedback is one instance of a control in marketing planning. This may entail requesting feedback about your business anonymously through surveys or polls that you send to your customers. After that, you can apply the feedback’s findings to enhance your business. For instance, if most customers agree in surveys that the business doesn’t have favorable online advertisements, the marketing strategy could include how to improve the advertisements. This may entail altering the advertising strategy, such as using brand ambassadors or influencers.
Market sales
There are many ways to gauge how well a business is doing in terms of sales, including the amount of profit it makes and the volume of goods that customers are buying. By conducting market research or collaborating with the sales department to help establish the goals, you can determine your controls for the target market sales. For instance, you might decide to conduct additional research on that segment of consumers if the demographic of a business is dominated by women between the ages of 18 and 36.
If you notice that sales are significantly up, look into the demographic to see why the product may be receiving such a favorable response.
Finances
Another example of controls in marketing is the finance section. When keeping tabs on the company’s budgeting and spending, which may include the funds allotted for advertising resources, you can exercise control. Other instances include the funds allocated for travel to business meetings or trade shows, as well as spending money on print, online, and television advertising. Working with a finance department expert might be beneficial because they can help you identify the controls to monitor and determine where the business can cut costs to increase profits.
Company milestones in the market share
Another illustration of a control in a marketing plan is a company milestone in terms of market share. Prior to implementing the marketing strategy, it is most effective to describe the company’s product market share. You can forecast the changes the product might make to the market share over a certain period of time in the marketing plan. You might find it helpful to speak with the sales team when making this projection to get a more precise understanding of how the company’s products are currently performing in the market share.
Tips for using controls in a marketing plan
Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when using controls in your marketing strategies:
Create check-in dates
Depending on the requirements of the business and the specifics of the marketing plan, establish weekly, monthly, or quarterly check-in dates. By doing this, you can make sure that the plan is on track to meet the target deadlines. You have a choice in how to respond when you review your progress on the check-in dates and find that you are behind schedule. For instance, you can adjust the marketing strategy to help you align the objectives with the available timeframe, or look into whether there are more effective ways to complete a task to help make up for the lost time.
Measure responses
When compared to measuring the company’s sales, you might find it useful to gauge the responses. This could bolster your confidence if you find that customer feedback has increased without corresponding growth in sales. You can describe this in your marketing strategy by stating that you’ll see a 20% increase in positive customer reviews. Your results would be your actual percentages of positive reviews, which would serve as your control. You can assess the effectiveness of your controls by including the ideal statistics you want to see from a business performance.
Set performance standards
Another way to improve your controls when using a marketing plan is to set performance standards. The performance standards are the metrics you use to assess the advancement and fulfillment of your objectives, which in turn determine how successful your company’s marketing strategy is. You could use the following examples as performance standards for a company’s marketing strategy:
When establishing these standards, you might also find it beneficial to consult with the departments of sales, finances, and human resources. This is beneficial because these experts may have a better understanding of how achievable these goals are and can direct you toward more realistic objectives that the company can strive to achieve.
Compare your actual results to the standards
It’s important to compare your actual results to the standards you set when creating the plan in order to better understand whether your marketing strategy was successful. This can help you identify areas where the business excelled and achieved its objectives while also highlighting potential problem areas. For instance, you might have accrued more followers than you had hoped for but struggled to increase your sales by the desired percentage.
When this occurs, you can observe and assess where you might want to alter your marketing strategy or streamline some internal business procedures to help you accomplish this goal the next time.
