Assessing Your Company's Marketing Strategy
As a business owner you have partners that include your banker, your CPA, and your lawyer. You hire a banker to help you secure capital to finance your business, you hire a CPA to save you taxes and oversee your internal bookkeeping, and you hire a lawyer to protect your investment in the business. Why don’t business owners think of marketing in the same way they think of these other areas? Most business owners but don’t ask what the ROI is from their loan officer, CPA, or lawyer. ROI for marketing is hard to determine, but by developing a marketing strategy, including a marketing plan, you can track and control each dollar spent on your company’s marketing. Review the following questions and be honest with yourself when answering them. If you want more information on how your company can develop systems to control and measure your marketing investment, give us a call we can help.
What is your company’s competitive advantage? +
You as the owner must identify or develop your company’s competitive advantage and teach your key management and employees how you plan to beat the competition and increase your company’s market share. In order to identify your competitive advantage you should compare the advantages and disadvantages of your business with two or more competitors in the areas of; price, location, image, products/services, customer service, quality, etc. Your competitive advantage should prove to your present and future customers that your products/services are distinct from your competition. You will then have to differentiate your products/services from your competition by communicating these differences and promoting your advantage over and over again. Sustainable businesses have identified and communicated their competitive advantage to the market.
Do you know your target market? +
You will first need to identify the demographic and psychographic of your current customer base, then you must determine the market area you are currently serving or choose to service in the future, next you will use valid sources to determine the “fit” of your market. Essentially estimating how many of your target customers reside in your selected market. All of the above information can be researched by using the Internet, polls, surveys, news clippings, any media where information can be accumulated and validated by reliable data. As the owner you must determine, through “best educated guess” and “intuition” what percent of your target customers within your identified market are your current customers and what percentage will become new regular customers in the future. This information is critical when analyzing the potential of your current market or when creating a sales forecast prior to entering a new market.
Do you know where your customer’s get their information? +
Identifying where your customers get their information is critical to your business as most companies do not have a huge promotional budget. Once you have determined where your customer’s get their information you will want to communicate your competitive advantage to them by answering these three questions. What’s it about?, grabbing your customer’s attention so they are receptive to your message. What’s in it for them?, creating or injecting the desire for your product or service. What do they do next?, motivating your customer’s by using a “call-to-action” statement, which is to buy your products/services. By identifying where your customer’s get their information, you will be assured of the best place to spend your promotion dollars.
Do you have a formal marketing plan? +
A marketing plan will determine what percentage of your marketing budget will be spent on advertising, personal selling, sales promotions, and publicity. It will state what media you will invest your marketing dollars, such as newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, direct mail, printed flyers and brochures, promotional displays, and your website. A marketing plan will coordinate the branding or your company in your business cards, your building signage (if applicable), your stationary and your uniforms. Formalizing a plan and tracking the effectiveness of each media used within the plan is important to the future success of your company’s marketing goals.
Do you have an annual marketing budget and marketing calendar? +
Establishing an annual marketing budget using the annual expense from your profit and loss statement will assure you that your advertising dollars will be within an acceptable range. By using an annual budget you will be able to react to the seasonality of your business cycle and advertise when the promotion will most positively affect your revenues. Planning on spending marketing dollars prior to the months when sales have historically been weak can greatly improve future revenues and improve other areas of your company such as work flow and cash flow. Establishing an annual marketing calendar can help to avoid spending money on impromptu marketing that does not reach your target market. You will be able to track specific promotions and trade shows to determine if the marketing dollars spent generated the desired increase in revenues.
Where do you get your leads? What media is producing an ROI? +
Tracking and evaluating the performance of several media options will assist you in determining which options are generating the most results for your business. If you do not track the results in writing, listing the media names, the development and placement costs of the advertisement, and the number of exposures during the designated time period, you cannot fully evaluate the ROI on a specific media. Tracking depends greatly on being able to understand what media your customer’s used to find your products/services. You must ask your customers to truly know, your employee answering the phone can ask and record your customer’s answers, and your company can also use polls and surveys to ask your customers where they heard of your products and services. This data is then written down, analyzed, and used when developing your annual marketing plan and budget.
Do you have a website? Do you have e-Commerce available? +
You know your company needs business cards and brochures to communicate to your customers; a website is just as important a tool to promote your business as either a business card or brochure. The standard format of a good website is; website strategy summary, a web business model, site positioning, traffic forecasting, front-end and back-end development. Your customers may not take your company seriously unless you have a web-presence. By structuring your website to take on-line transactions known as e-Commerce your website can drive revenues for your company and sell to anyone, anywhere in the world, at anytime of day. The majority of business websites are hosted by host server providers offering a wide range of options specifying things like how many megabytes you can store, the number of e-mail accounts available, and how many gigabytes of data transfer are allowed. A website is a necessary component in a sustainable business model.
