How to Evaluate Your Digital Marketing Program

By Michelle Wimmer

Marketing, and especially digital marketing, can be frustrating for business owners and leaders due to its “black box” nature. For those who are not marketing experts, while it’s often clear whether marketing as a whole is “working” or “not working,” it’s less clear why that might be the case.

There are a wide range of factors that could be contributing to why a marketing program might be struggling to produce results. One of the challenges with modern marketing is that the discipline has become so complicated that you often have to dig through mountains of data to get to the core workings of the marketing engine. Because of this, my first inclination when I begin an evaluation is almost always to look to simplify.

In my eyes, assessing a marketing program can be consolidated down to three distinct areas: people, processes and platform. Sure, there are always nuances, and every program is fundamentally different in its own unique way. Still, the 3 Ps framework is almost always a good place to start in an objective assessment of a marketing program.

Goal Setting

Before we get into the framework itself, we need to start by setting goals for the evaluation process, including answering some form of the following questions:

• Why are we performing a thorough evaluation of the program in the first place? 
• What do we want and need to do with the findings after we’ve completed our assessment? 
• What business metrics need to be impacted by marketing and what expectations are we putting on marketing to achieve (as we make adjustments based on the evaluation)?
• What rubrics are we using to define what’s working and what’s not working?

Beyond allowing you to set parameters around the work and assisting you in measuring the results of the evaluation process and the work that comes after, goal setting can also help you with objectivity. There are areas of marketing that you and your team can measure down to the nth degree and there are others that will always be more ethereal and subjective. The most effective assessments will be those where you can remove as much of your own biases as possible. The decisions you make as a result of the evaluation will naturally include some subjectivity; you will almost always be better served by making those calls after looking at data gathered from a more objective evaluation.

Once you’ve identified your goals, you’re ready to dive into your assessment.

Step 1: People

Understanding the people behind your digital marketing program is the first step because, if you don’t have the right people, no amount of processes and platforms will make your program successful.

When assessing people, I’ve found it valuable to start with the positives. What are the key strengths of each person on the team and how do those strengths align with the goals of the marketing program and the organization as a whole? Beyond getting a solid picture of each person and their contributions, this also helps uncover a bigger picture of the areas of strength and skill gaps for the program as a whole. For example, you may find that you’re very strong in marketing operations but very light in content expertise.

As you dig deeper, shift your focus from the person to the role. What is the impact of each role and where are gaps and struggles relative to marketing and company goals? Taken together, insights into each person and the impact of their current roles can help you build a roadmap to get back to growth. I’ve often found that organizations have the right people, but that they’re in the wrong roles or don’t have the required training. It’s a lot easier to make these adjustments than to realize you have the wrong person and need to replace them, although that’s one possible outcome of the evaluation process.

I also recommend looking at the individual goals and incentive programs you have in place to see how these align with and motivate people. You may only require a few tweaks in these programs to make the entire team more effective.

One oft-overlooked element of the people evaluation process is a review of the external groups that are working with your marketing team. Take the time to understand what these groups – agencies, vendors, freelancers and other contractors – are being paid, what projects they are undertaking and roles they are filling, how they are incentivized, and their goals relative to the goals of the business. I’ve often found that these external partners bring more specialization and expertise at a more affordable cost, and that the work they are doing is critical work that the in-house team would not have access to otherwise. I’ve also found, in many cases, a lack of defined goals and metrics, a lack of alignment with the broader goals of the marketing team and organization, and a lack of clear communication between the partners and the team. 

If that’s the case in your organization, it’s vitally important to close those gaps and create crystal clear alignment to ensure every partnership is as effective as it can possibly be.

Step 2: Process

When created and implemented well, processes help give clear direction and structure, and allow for continual improvements. 

I’m a firm believer in avoiding over-processing marketing, and I’ve seen many organizations where this adds unnecessary complexity and slows work to a crawl. That said, it’s extremely important to implement a framework for certain processes to avoid massive inefficiencies in your marketing.

The first frameworks I recommend are often in the production of marketing content and collateral and on the handoff between marketing and sales in terms of how leads come into the system and how they’re managed by both teams. I won’t spend a lot of time there in this post, however, as I want to focus on one of the more technical process areas: campaign structure.

My rationale is that, if you’re running campaigns, you’re spending at least some money on advertising. Very few businesses can afford any level of waste within their advertising spend, and I’ve seen preventable inefficiencies in campaign structure far too often in my assessments.

When you’re setting up your campaigns, start with the intended goals and objectives of the campaign, and importantly, how each subset of the campaign ladders up to your business goals and objectives. It’s surprisingly easy to overcomplicate your campaign structure. That means having too many campaigns running at the same time, too many subsets within each campaign, and spreading yourself too thin so that your campaigns aren’t able to gather enough data or generate enough impact within the budget you’ve allocated. On the flip side, I’ve also seen a number of clients running too few campaigns, with not enough of the segmentation of audiences that’s required for truly targeted marketing. Structuring campaigns is a delicate balance that can benefit from an expert viewpoint.

Assessing campaign structure can be done by reviewing each element of your overall marketing approach: audience, geography, audience splits, time of day, day of week, device types, etc. Then, apply this data to campaigns and subsets of campaigns, including ad creative. It can be a tedious process and can also be extremely worth your time. I’ve seen clients save anywhere from 25 percent to 52 percent year-over-year in their campaigns based on these efficiencies alone.

Step 3: Technology

Anyone who has spent any time working in marketing knows that technology can be a blessing, a curse, and everything in between. And that’s precisely why technology is the third step in our assessment: it’s critical that marketing teams are only using technology in a way that’s making them more efficient and effective. 

This evaluation starts with a review of the key needs of the client, including those that may or may not be covered with technology. Once that list has been identified (or created if it didn’t exist before), you will map current technology to each need. In my experience, you’ll likely find at least some lack of alignment here, and potentially quite a few discrepancies between the problems you’re trying to solve and the technology you’ve purchased and put into place.

The most common situation I see is overbuying. Organizations have too many platforms, some of which have features and benefits that overlap, and they’re not using most of them effectively. With employee turnover and shifts in strategy over time, it’s remarkably easy to find yourself in this situation. I also see the other end of the spectrum: an incomplete tech stack. These organizations have so little from a technology perspective that most of the work in their businesses is completed manually, creating ongoing inefficiencies that could be eliminated with technology.

After identifying the gaps between what the organization has and what it needs, the next step is to create a strategic plan on how to refine and use the tech stack moving forward. I’ve found this is best done in a phased approach, starting with small achievable goals and working toward longer-term efficiency wins. If you have the right processes and people but not the right technology, you may 

After we access what is needed then we work to come up with a strategic plan on how to best utilize the technology stack. We start out with small, achievable goals and work towards longer-term efficiency wins. Making sure that the right technology is in place is critical, as is ensuring that each platform can communicate with the others, and that employees are trained on each platform and accountable for using each to its fullest extent.

Simplifying Your Evaluation to People, Processes and Platforms

If creating a marketing program that seamlessly runs on all cylinders and drives exceptional outcomes for the business was easy, everyone would already be doing it.

It’s natural to struggle with it and even to be overwhelmed by it. If it’s feeling like a gargantuan effort, try simplifying your approach to the 3 Ps. And if that doesn’t work, consider hiring an expert to help.