Marketing Health Check
Stop! Don’t spend another penny on marketing until you have completed the Marketing Health Check. Simply ask yourself the following 5 questions before continuing to commit time, energy, effort and money into any form of marketing whether new or old.
Question 1
What are you looking to achieve?
Most likely it will be increased sales, but it could also be greater retention, increased exposure or even the formation of a strategic partnership. It’s important at this stage to set yourself realistic goals, so that you can track the success of your campaign. If you’re looking to purchase the services of a marketing company, make sure you ask about anticipated results. If they can’t give you any there’s a very good reason, it’s because they don’t actually know. Or they do know, and they don’t want to tell you as the results will be less than impressive.
Question 2
How will you measure success?
Any analyst worth their salt will tell you that stats don’t lie. Which is why it’s so important to be able to quickly and easily access the results of your campaign. If you can’t measure the success or failure of a marketing campaign, don’t go there! At the end of the day the marketing solution that you choose should be able to ratify itself.
Question 3
Are you marketing to the right audience?
The only way to truly establish this is through market research. This doesn’t have to be conducted on the streets with a clipboard and a biro. You can just as easily if not even more effectively conduct market research over the phone or via email questionnaires. Investing the time to getting this right will help you no end in the long run. You could even ask those in your focus group, how they would prefer to receive marketing messages if you were trying to sell your product or service to them.
Question 4
Is this really the best option?
Let’s take email marketing as an example. You may wish to conduct some email marketing to old client list that you have stored away somewhere. A quick Google search will reveal 1,000’s of different email marketing solutions. First rule of thumb, only pay attention to the first 10 genuine search results. Don’t forget these companies are marketing experts, if they are unable to get their own site to rank well it would be best to omit them from your research. As a part of your research into each of the 10 options ensure you check, (i) Price, (ii) Contract periods, (iii) Support infrastructure, (iv) Professionalism of their website, (v) Management information available, (vi) Ease of use.
Question 5
When should you stop?
It’s very easy to let emotions get in the way, you may feel it’s easier to continue down the same road as you can’t bear to contemplate the complexities involved with changing. Don’t underestimate this either. Our adversity to change will often drive us to continually make the same mistakes over and over. Usually until someone points it out to us, or until it’s too late. So; remove emotion from the equation, look at the stats. Is your current approach delivering the desired level of success? If the answer is no, now is the time to stop.