How to measure and evaluate your marketing activity
- Marc Jackson
- Mar 26
- 2 min read
Measuring and evaluating your marketing activity is so important.
It allows you to show whether the activity has worked or not, plus helps communicate this to the rest of the business. It also informs future strategy and gives you a chance to celebrate your success.
If you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry. Read our top tips and you’ll soon be an evaluating whizz ✨
Use your data
The first step is to collect and evaluate your data. Then, make sure you use it.
There are lots of things data can help with. For example, it can show you where to invest more money or pull money out. Or, it can help you work out ROI.
Make sure you get your findings out in the business. Create your docs and set up meetings to go through them. Celebrate your successes and learn from your failures.
Past performance stats should also feed into next year’s strategy plans – you’ll make the best plans when you’ve got strong findings to guide you.
Make a recommendation
You should always suggest something based on your evaluation.
The right recommendation is the one that’s right for the business. Don’t be afraid of learnings and don’t try and protect something that hasn’t performed well. Instead, learn from what’s happened and suggest one of the following:
Stop – the activity is failing so stop it completely.
Optimise – overall it’s going well, so make it more efficient.
Repeat – it’s performed great so run the activity again, potentially with more money.
Pivot – it’s not quite working but you know what needs to happen to fix it.
Be succinct
When writing your evaluation up, communicate the headlines.
Don’t get too bogged down in detail. Instead, include high level details like:
Overview of activity/project
Key objectives/KPIs
Performance against KPIs
Key learnings
Recommendations
Timings and next steps
Consider how your stakeholders like to receive info too, and tailor your evaluation to them. If they like visuals, include more pictures. Or add more data for someone who likes lots of details.
It’s still worth writing up a longhand version of your evaluation full of all your learnings as well — it’ll be helpful for you to refer back to and can act as a bible if you move companies.
Create a one-pager
Streamline your evaluation even further by getting it all on one page.
Include all the info someone would need to understand what has happened, why it’s happened, and what needs to happen in the future. This means:
Start with a headline that explains what the activity/project was
Include recommendations
Show summary of performance against KPIs using a traffic light system
Write up actionable key learnings
Add performance highlights, along with pictures
This resource came from our Commercials Crash Course
This is 5 week course teaching you everything you need to know about finance and commercials for a successful career in FMCG marketing. Taught by industry experts with almost 50 years combined experience at Coca-Cola, Diageo, Fever-Tree, The Collective and Lily’s Kitchen.