Before embarking on your next marketing campaign, here are some pointers on what you need to do in order to improve your success rate.
1. Have a robust marketing plan.
This plan should set out:
- What you want to achieve from your marketing initiatives.
- Who you will be targeting.
- What activities you intend to do and when.
- What messages you want to communicate.
- Who is responsible for the marketing plan and implementing different activities.
- The budget assigned to your marketing activities.
A lack of a marketing plan means your marketing becomes haphazard and unlikely to happen, rather than being focused and proactive.
2. Have a database/CRM that is fit for purpose.
If you can’t easily access information about your clients and prospects for marketing purposes, you will no doubt be wasting a lot of time. In some cases, it’s easier to opt for the ‘let’s not bother option’ because it seems too complicated to pull together a list of clients in a specific grouping.
An up to date, well-populated database will make it easier to contact specific groups, speed up the process and make your marketing activities much more effective. Being able to segment your database by business type, size of business, services already using etc., is a must.
With GDPR and the forthcoming new e-Privacy Regulations, your database should also store people’s marketing preferences, i.e. how they want to receive marketing information from you. Plus you have to log when they opt out of receiving marketing communications and make sure you adhere to this in the future.
3. Have the appropriate marketing resource to achieve your goals.
Frequently, a lot of firms have some great marketing ideas but through lack of time and internal resource, they fail to execute these ideas.
Another common problem is you may have a spurt of marketing activities over a couple of months and then do nothing for a year. Your marketing will be much more effective if you have someone overseeing/implementing a steady stream of different marketing activities throughout the year. Have you got the internal resource to help you achieve that? If not do you need to consider recruiting a marketing person or outsourcing some of the activities to a marketing agency?
4. Know which marketing activities are most effective.
You should be actively logging what responses you get from your marketing activities. E.g.
- Responses from emails, mailings and adverts.
- Click thru rates on email newsletters and which topics seem most popular.
- Traffic going to your website and key search terms people are using.
- Engagements on your social media posts.
- The number of sales appointments made and the quality of the prospects from telemarketing activities.
There are many steps you can take to measure your marketing activities, so make sure you log them and review the feedback regularly to see what’s working best for you.
I would suggest you review your marketing support and infrastructure annually. In doing so you will get a better idea as to whether you’re marketing activities are being as effective as they could be.