Marketing / Communications
Articles
“Evaluating and Updating Your Byway Marketing Plan,”
America’s Byways Resource Center; Vistas, January/February 2004
Marketing: Evaluating and Updating Your Byway Marketing Plan
The heart of winter is not typically a time to think about marketing (unless your byway is a snow destination). However, it is a great time to update your marketing plan for the coming season. More importantly, it is a time to take stock in what you did you year before, how good the results were and what you would change or adjust next time.
Byway groups continually balance a variety of projects, priorities and partners, and evaluation sometimes falls by the wayside. To create a new plan without realizing how effective the last one was can hurt your efforts and waste valuable time and money in the long run.
In those cold winter months, dig out your plans and priorities from 2003 and take stock.
- What were your marketing goals?
- Did you have a plan for each goal?
- Did you make adjustments?
- Did you involve your partners?
- How much did the project really cost?
- Did you do a cost benefit analysis to see if you really got the change you wanted?
- How much volunteer/staff time did each priority take?
- Why did a particular project not get done?
- And most importantly, were these marketing priorities integrated in your other plans such as interpretation, updating your corridor management plan, or your overall strategic plan for the year?
For many byways, looking back can yield many mini-marketing goals that were targeted at different audiences. Perhaps your byway was working on some local community well-being issues that required a public relations campaign to local community leaders. That same byway may have also been working with the visitor’s bureau to develop a brochure for travelers as well as finalizing an interpretive plan. All of these audiences were valuable to the success of the byway, so it is important to evaluate the different methods and to see them as a whole picture.
A spreadsheet might be a helpful tool when laying out what was accomplished compared to what audience was targeted and what goal of the strategic plan that marketing initiative was aimed at. This simple tool can be used to gauge the importance of new projects and ideas that come up throughout the year as well as serve as a way to stop a project if it looks like the goals are not being met. Many byways post such a list at every meeting and refer to it when initiating new ideas.
Evaluating your efforts can also give your byway something to brag about when reaching out for support for new projects. If your byway was able to help that same visitor bureau with a map, start a template for interpretation and yielded a number of hits on a website about the area, then why not report this in an annual report to all of your stakeholders? This is a nice way to show what you have accomplished and increase their confidence in your ability to deliver on new projects. A word to the wise, however, avoid the desire to make things sound too wonderful. If a project did not work, report that information as well. Your stakeholders and your group need accurate information to be able to evaluate future opportunities.
Following these simple suggestions and mapping out your success will make the job of drafting you new plans much easier. Your byway group can accurately see what was accomplished and be strategic about finishing goals or tackling new marketing projects for 2004.