5 Ways To Give Your Marketing A New Year Workout
It’s that time of the year for setting new goals and making new personal resolutions, with an opportunity to plan ahead and see things through fresh eyes. The same can apply to our businesses.
Here are some points to consider to ensure that your marketing is in shape to take on the year ahead.
1. Challenge your customer knowledge
Review how you categorise your customer segments – are they still relevant to today’s marketplace, or has anything changed?
How profitable are each of these segments? Is that likely to change?
2. Review your market information
New products and services are emerging all the time, what is really driving market growth?
Where are you positioned compared to your competitors?
3. Do you know what really makes your business different?
A USP can be assigned to a particular product, a service, or the entire business. However perceived benefits may be eroded over time, given competitor activity.
Review why your customers currently buy from you and how unique that is compared to other products or services in the marketplace. Are you still likely to be unique in a couple of years? Are you keeping ahead of the marketplace, with new product/service developments?
4. Decide which marketing activities have really worked
Marketing metrics can be easily put in place to capture where enquiries are coming from and which of these routes resulted in an actual sale. You may also need to involve other departments to build in some simple questions and feedback on activity.
It’s likely to be a broad combination of channels, but some may be more successful than others.
Gathering this information now puts the business in a better position when it comes to deciding how to allocate next year’s marketing budget. Think about the whole mix – website and social media, exhibitions, advertising and PR, direct mail, promotions etc, but also personal selling.
5. Plan ahead
Assess if you have a clear plan of marketing activity and a process for reviewing where you are against that plan.
Set objectives for at least the next 2 years and share them across your team so that everyone is on board.
As a simple exercise to help you assess where you are against all of this, try the exercise below:
THE NEW YEAR WORKOUT
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Marketing Activities
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Rate Your Business (1 = very poor to 10 = Excellent)
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Required action
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Market and Customer Knowledge
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I can categorise my customers into different groups
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I know my most profitable services/products
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I know strengths/weaknesses of my key competitors
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I know the market size and key trends
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I know what makes us unique in the marketplace
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I have a development pipeline for new products/services
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Marketing Strategy & Planning
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Rate your most successful route (1 = very poor to 10 = Excellent)
How do you know?
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Required Action
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Advertising
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PR
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Promotions/competitions
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Website/e-newsletters
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Social media activity
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Direct mail
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Brochures
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Exhibitions/events
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Sponsorship
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Personal selling
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Other
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Since all businesses have specific requirements, this article should be used for background guidance only and should not be understood as one to one, personal business advice. For this reason, no liability can be accepted by Freelance Marketing Ltd