Marketing Health Check
Written by Elizabeth Clark.
I’m here to remind you that it is time for a marketing health check.
There has been a lot of conversation about an impending recession. While I will leave that one for the economists, there is a shift in consumer and business behaviour. So now is a great time to get ahead of the crowd with a marketing health check.
Here are five critical areas for review:
Marketing Plan: Do we need need to adjust our marketing plan? Is our strategy still sound given shifting market conditions?
Target Market Analysis: Are we spending our time and money talking to the right people?
Key Performance Indicators: Are we monitoring the correct KPIs to allocate resources to sales targets efficiently?
Marketing Budget: Are we allocating our budget efficiently? Are we paying for services, platforms or programs that we do not need?
Human Resources: Is our marketing team operating effectively?
Read on for deeper dive into each of these topics and some helpful tips for assessment and evaluation.
Marketing Plan
Review your marketing plan and benchmark your initial business initiatives and strategic goals against current market conditions. Beware of overhaul tendency - the objective of this exercise is not to rewrite your marketing plan. Instead, take a critical evaluation of the key initiatives with the following questions:
Does this still make sense given market conditions?
Do we need to change our approach to achieve this goal?
An example may include launching a premium product line or service offering. Has the uptick been slower than expected? Is the return on investment lower than anticipated? Perhaps throttle back in this area and reallocate some resources to a high-performing core product or service offering. But, again, we are not talking about a radical shift in direction but rather a subtle course correction or adjustment of expectations.
Target Market Analysis
The name of the game here is the efficient allocation of resources. Are your marketing resources (both time and money) properly allocated to target markets with the highest potential ROI? And are you targeting your marketing efforts efficiently with segmentation?
From a digital perspective, think both paid and organic. Ensure paid ads are served to the right audiences and the budget isn’t wasted on clicks that won’t convert. Consider segmenting newsletter databases based on purchase behaviour and tailoring social content by the platform based on user demographics.
Key Performance Indicators
Customer retention is one of the most critical metrics during a possible economic contraction. The typical stat that gets thrown around is that it costs x5 more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. Retention is an easy KPI for e-commerce companies to monitor, and bricks-and-mortar, B2B or service-based businesses can use a CRM with sales data to track customer retention rates.
E-commerce organizations should also be closely monitoring return on ad spend. If your return on ad spend does not meet your industry standards, you may be wasting advertising dollars unnecessarily.
And, of course, the KPI that trumps all others is sales revenue. Be careful not to get bogged down in the daily or weekly figures, but rather focus on trends monthly or quarterly. Break it down by source as much as possible and use the year-over-year comparison to inform an adjustment to the marketing plan as necessary.
Budget
Ask three questions when critically evaluating a budget mid-year:
Are we allocating sufficient budget to high ROI marketing tactics?
Are we paying for unnecessary services, platforms or programs that we do not need or are not using?
Are we accurately monitoring our return on advertising and marketing spending?
Now is the time to go through the budget on a line-by-line basis, compare actual spending against the budgeted figure, and get serious about moving money around if it would better serve to increase or maintain sales growth.
Human Resources
And finally, look at how your marketing team is spending their time. So often, we do not consider the hidden cost of employee hours. Be sure that the team is maximizing their time on revenue-generating activities such as customer retention and new customer acquisition. And this is not a suggestion to get your team to work more but perhaps deprioritize less essential projects in favour of sales-generating action.
Another excellent point for reflection is whether roles are suited to skillsets. It is often more efficient to outsource some tactical activities to keep team roles best suited to their skillset. As an added but significant bonus, it will mean that everyone is happier at work.
Do you need help with a marketing health check for your organization? Book a complimentary discovery call today.
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