My last blog post was on the importance of laying out a marketing plan, after working with several firms who really have little history of previous marketing efforts and results. Shocking.

People who lay out their plans and track their efforts have their favorite formats and fields to monitor. Telemarketing and email firms usually give detailed analysis of their efforts. It’s really helpful to consolidate the basic information into one spreadsheet. I prefer to use Excel or Google docs, the latter if sharing the information with someone else on a regular basis or multiple people are updating the workbook. I can incorporate formulas to calculate results, saving time. I can also sort the plan by any number of fields: lowest cost per return, type of return, effort number, highest open rate, etc.

Below is a sample in Excel of a marketing plan. Obviously, this is not live data. Also, the columns would be laid straight across the top columns, but it would be too small to read to show that here!

If you are creating your first plan, I hope you find this guide helpful.  If you already track your efforts, are there other fields you think I should include?

An upcoming post will discuss how we use this marketing analysis to react during the marketing efforts (did an effort bomb? did one rock?) and to plan for future campaign.

The journey continues.

C