Overview: Marketing Activities Tool

As small-business owners, you have limited time and budget, so that means your marketing activities must be filtered for its level of impact and ease-of-implementation to ensure optimal effectiveness.

The Marketing Activities tool from Apogee Marketing Partners is an easy way to evaluate and prioritize your marketing activities. With marketing activities, I like to advise my clients to conduct a brainstorming session for possible activities. Don’t be too concerned about costs at this point, just begin listing items that are in alignment with your overall business objectives and goals. Once you complete the list, now you can use the tool.

In the Marketing Activities tool, enter all of the relevant ideas that you generated during the brainstorming session. Order of listing does not matter. And for each entry, indicate whether this is a NEW, CONTINUE, or DROPPED activity under Status. The reason for including DROPPED is the next time you utilize this tool, you will have a historical account of what you have done in the past. Next enter, the primary Metric that you will utilize to measure progress or success. As you can see, the metric is not always dollars or sales. In this case, you need to be more specific, as it is difficult, in some cases, to determine the true impact of one activity to overall sales.

If this is a CONTINUE marketing activity, an estimated Current Impact should be entered. Keep in mind that your impact will be based on the primary metric you specified in the Metric cell, meaning if the metric is LEADS, you can then estimate the % impact of this activity on lead generation. The same concept applies with Target Impact. Under the Impact column, select from the drop down menu Very High, High, Medium, or Low. Note that this is subjective and in some cases you may feel that the impact of one activity may not be shared by another marketer, so try to be objective in how you rank your impact. Next, select the level of difficulty in implementing the activity under Implementation. When selecting, think of things like duration of implementation, resources required other than you, contracts, etc. How difficult or how easy will it be to get this activity launched?

When you complete these sections, the Category column will indicate one of four of the following: Easy Wins, Focus, Long Term, or Evaluate. These will coincide with the chart provided below the table.

Easy Wins If any of your activities fall under this category, it is then considered a low impact and easy to implement activity. In some cases, you may want to employ these Easy Wins for your marketing as they will in most cases have low cost and will not require a whole team of marketers to implement. Choose wisely, however, to ensure that you are initiating marketing activities that are aligned with your business objectives and goals. These activities will reside on the lower-right quadrant of the chart.

Focus These are activities that have been identified to provide the highest impact along with an easier implementation process. Focusing on these activities will help you to optimize the highest return to your business. These are your marketing prizefighters. Focus activities will reside on the upper-right quadrant of the chart.

Long-Term In the upper-left quadrant, the Long-Term category simply implies that these activities are not going to have immediate impact on your business. Rather, they are activities that will the platform for growth in the future. These range from public relations initiatives, surveys, white papers, case-studies, etc.

Evaluate Everywhere on the chart that is not occupied by the above. When an activity is categorized as Evaluate, it is considered to be an initiative that does not return to the business sufficiently to support and invest its development and implementation. The key objective when an item is considered Evaluate is to ensure that it is re-examined for its role within the overall business objectives. Don’t discard Evaluates, rather put them on the backburner for future consideration as your ability to develop and implement may change, both from a technology and resource standpoint.

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