Track & Evaluate Your Progress

You now have the templates to use to set up your very own marketing action plan.

Do you have a S.M.A.R.T. goal? Have you set up 5-10 tasks using the 5W template? I hope so!

Once you’ve done that and you start implementing your plan, you’ll want to track your progress and also evaluate your plan after some time to see what might need revising.

Weekly Tracking

Tracking your progress doesn’t have to be complicated. I find a simple table/spreadsheet is a great tool for this—I call it a weekly tracker. It can be kept on your computer or printed out—your choice depending on whether you’re a digital person or a pen/paper person.

I’ve included a link at the bottom of this post to a template for a marketing action plan and a weekly tracker. As you’ll see, I split it out into 2 separate tables and just included the WHAT and WHEN on the weekly tracker (for space reasons). You could combine them all into one document if that works better for you (especially if you’re not printing it out).

I’ve included columns for Monday through Friday—you could revise to include the days of your work week. If a particular task is only going to be completed on certain days of the week, you could cross out the boxes for the other days (if that helps you visualize your schedule).

I’ve also included space to list your S.M.A.R.T. goal and progress toward it.

When a task is completed, add a mark in the appropriate day’s column (an X, a checkmark, a line, whatever). If you’ll complete a certain task more than one time in a day, you can put different marks in the box to indicate each time you’ve done it.

Using a weekly tracker like this will help you hold yourself accountable to your plan and also give you a sense when something might need to be adjusted (particularly if something is NOT happening as planned).

Evaluate & Revise

After you’ve gone through some time completing and tracking your tasks—I’d say maybe about 4 weeks—you’ll be able to see how things are going with your plan.

Are you completing your tasks every week? If not, why not? For example, was your plan too ambitious or is a particular task something that you really don’t want to do? Remember, it’s good to push yourself, but be realistic.

If you’re easily completing your tasks each week, is there room for adding something else? Perhaps increasing the frequency and/or duration of certain tasks or adding new tasks?

You’ll also want to evaluate your progress toward your S.M.A.R.T. goal. Since you created a goal that’s measurable (the “M” of S.M.A.R.T.), it should be easy to indicate how close you are to your goal. For example, it could be a count like “I have 1 of 3 new clients” or a percentage like “I’m 25% to my goal”—whatever makes sense for you and your goal.

The beauty of this type of marketing action plan is that it’s easy to follow and also easy to customize to your particular situation—both now and in the future. So as your needs change, be sure to change your plan accordingly.

I hope this helps! Any questions or comments about this, please post them here.

Marketing Action Plan Template and Weekly Tracker Template