Evaluate Marketing Mistakes of 2010

Have you done your evaluation on how your marketing strategies were doing in 2010? If not, please do so now. It’s already coming to the end of December, or we say the end of year 2010. The Marketing Team should be busy about planning for 2011 already. Before preparing your Marketing plan of 2011, you should analyze what have been done wrong this year from the very beginning until now.

Why?

Marketing is all about spending money and maximizing the return on investment (ROI). Evaluating old marketing plans would definitely prevent you in making the same mistakes and spending your money in the wrong ways.

Even you may already record all results of the marketing campaigns while you were executing them during the year, you should still pull them out and review them again. There are companies simply stop campaigns to avoid spending additional money. Of course, that’s a right move, but what should be done next? Many would just keep going on other promotions as we all know time is limited and promotions must go on. Therefore, no one actually had the time to evaluate the reasons that the marketing campaign didn’t work at the first place.

It is important to evaluate them now, before starting any promotions in 2011 yet. If the campaign didn’t work in 2010, does it mean that it won’t work in 2011? The answer is NO.  The world is changing so fast, you may be surprised with the great results of the particular campaign that failed on you in 2011. Therefore, a few usual reasons should be looked at when you are evaluating your Marketing strategies.

1.       Time – Was it the right time to promote the product, execute the marketing plan? It might be too soon or too late when you are promoting a product. Your competitors are also acting fast, or your marketing channels might not be as mature.

2.       Audiences – Were you targeting the right audiences? This is very important nowadays when the Internet has become one of the biggest advertising channels for most of the companies. You have to define your target audiences to maximize your results; otherwise, you are just spending money into the water and showing your ads to irrelevant, 0% potential customers.

3.       Price – Were you setting the price right? Evaluating this would definitely help you preparing the next year marketing budget and profit margin. Some would say, if you have the right price, the product can be sold by itself. This is somewhat true, but marketing channels to let people know about the product is also important. The two things are interrelated and require margin vs cost to bring out the best result.

4.       Channels – Were you doing enough and being up-to-date in reaching potential customers? If you are still staying in the old ways of marketing, you may only reach like 10% or even less of your potential customers. That’s the reason Facebook, Twitter, etc are perceived as very good marketing tools. You are expanding your reach to so many places without having to spend a lot of money and can always update the new promotion in high frequency.

There are way more things to be evaluated depending on how much you have done in 2010. Doing a summary would help in telling you two simple things: what things haven’t been done in 2010? What should be done in 2011?