When was the last time you reviewed your marketing and communications strategy? When it comes to marketing effectiveness a regular review is vital.
In all business functions, it is important to take stock of what you are doing and whether it’s working or not. We tend to do that more regularly with finance, IT, HR, systems and operations, but not so often when it comes to marketing.
So, when it comes to reviewing your marketing what should you consider?
Is your marketing delivering the results you want?
Are you satisfied that your current marketing activities are:
- Achieving the level of income you intended, both firm-wide and for individual products and services?
- Attracting your ‘perfect’ clients? Read our blog about identifying and attracting your perfect client.
- Retaining your existing clients by keeping in touch with them on a regular basis?
- Proactively communicating with your staff to make sure they are aware of all your products and services and developments in the firm?
- Happening in a progressive manner and coming in on time and budget?
If your answer is ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ when it comes to meeting your objectives, you need to identify what you need to change to turn things around.
However, you may also want to consider if your objectives were realistic in the first place, e.g. aiming to double your turnover within 12 months whilst not proactively doing any marketing, could be a bit of a tall order!
Are you doing the right type of marketing activities?
Many firms rely on referrals to supply a steady stream of new clients. However, you could be missing out on potential new ‘perfect clients’ because they haven’t been referred to you.
It’s important to implement a range of marketing activities across different channels so that your message has more chance of being seen by the people you want to target.
A healthy dose of marketing activities can also make it easy for referrals to contact you. Additional marketing activities help to validate the glowing testimonial they have received from their friends, family or business associates.
Take a step back and look at all the marketing activities you do, consider:
- How often are you doing them? They should be happening regularly in order to build momentum.
- Are they getting you in front of your potential perfect clients? If not, it may be you have chosen the wrong type of marketing activity to get to that audience.
- Are you generating enquiries but not converting them into sales? If this is an issue, ideally get some feedback from your ‘dead leads’. It may be down to pricing vs likely value, or their perception of how your products/services could benefit them. However, sometimes it may be down to how you promote yourself and the brand image you are communicating.
Are your marketing messages hitting the spot?
When writing any form of marketing communication it should always be written with your target audience (perfect client) in mind. What do they want to see and hear? What will appeal to them and make them contact you? Quite often firms do the ‘same old, same old’ when it comes to their marketing message, e.g. renewing the same adverts, with the same copy in the same publications and then they wonder why their adverts aren’t yielding a response anymore!
The same applies to any form of marketing. So closely review your marketing messages, be that in your promotional emails, social media posts, mailings, brochures, websites etc. How long ago was the message written and is it still relevant? Is the copy going to engage with your perfect clients and elicit a response? If not, you need to rewrite it and make the copy more compelling.
Is your internal or external marketing support meeting your needs?
Are you happy that your marketing activities are getting the attention and support they need to make them as effective as possible? Whether you have someone within your firm who is responsible for marketing or you are using an external agency or consultant, it is important to review their role(s) on a regular basis to make sure they are achieving the desired results.
Internal marketing people may benefit from having additional support from partners/directors on the marketing strategy and what the firm is trying to achieve. They may also benefit from having an external marketing mentor to discuss ideas with and to help give them some direction.
If you use external marketing agencies and consultants, there should also be separate review meetings (over and above the strategy and day to day activities they are involved in) to assess whether the relationship is still working for both parties. Consider if the agency is still meeting your needs, are they delivering the results they said they would or have their ideas become a bit stale. Speaking to other agencies or consultants could identify different ways of working and new marketing approaches, which could make your marketing more effective.
Conclusion
Your marketing activities should deliver value for money (and results). If they don’t, the above pointers will identify what elements need further work so that you’re constantly improving your marketing effectiveness.
If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to evaluating your firm’s marketing, we offer a free marketing review service to help you get to grips with your marketing strategy.
