How to improve your marketing strategy

When was the last time you took a step back and assessed how well your marketing is performing and what might not be quite up to par?

As we find ourselves in a post-pandemic world, when no doubt your business has changed forever, if you haven’t done so already, now really is the time to conduct a marketing audit!

Sometimes we get a feeling that something isn’t quite right, but we just don’t know where to start, or how to figure out what we should or shouldn’t be doing.

If this was your personal health, you’d go see a doctor and have the problem diagnosed right?

Well, consider this your prescription to a healthy and thriving marketing ecosystem…

Step one… Ask yourself…

• Where’s our business heading? What’s the plan for the next 12 months / 3 years?
• What are our big goals and measures of success?
• What are our biggest challenges and what opportunities lie before us?
• What is our sales strategy for the next 12 months? Where are we focussing our attention?

When working at a truly strategic level great marketing builds great businesses

Only once you’ve a clear picture of where you want your business to be can you really start to understand whether your marketing ecosystem (marketing strategy + delivery system) is fit for purpose.

In order to do so, firstly it’s important to understand the key building blocks of a successful marketing ecosystem…

Step two… Now it’s time to get your teams involved – be honest, open, and ask yourselves…

1. Vision
   1. What are our current marketing goals and how closely aligned are these to our business goals?
   2. What’s our approach to marketing planning?
      1. What does our current plan look like, when do we plan, who is involved, how do we decide what we do?
   3. How well does our marketing activity support our sales activity?
2. Landscape
   1. Do we have a clear understanding of who our ideal customer(s) is/are – their hearts and minds?
   2. Do we understand who our competitors are and how they’re playing in the market?
   3. Have we clearly identified what we want to be famous for? Do we clearly articulate our value proposition? Not only the features and benefits of our service offering, but most importantly the ultimate impact of working with us?
3. Customer journey
   1. Have we mapped out the customer journey that will take our ideal customer(s) from being completely oblivious we (or a better way of working) even exist, through to becoming raving fans?
      1. Where are our human touch points? Is each activity adding value to this journey – if not, why are we doing it?
      2. What wow moments have we built in along the way?
      3. What are our key content pillars/types/channels that will engage and nurture our ideal customer(s) through the different stages of their buying journey? How will we measure success?
4. People
   1. How well do we communicate with our teams on the business vision and the role they play in its success?
   2. How well do our marketing, sales, and account management teams communicate and collaborate with each other – not just operationally, but strategically?
5. Processes
   1. Do we have a clear definition of marketing leads, sales leads, and opportunities that everyone is aligned to and what data/insight are we capturing that will help us continue to improve our conversion rates?
   2. Where and how do we track the marketing > sales > customer account growth process?
6. Tech
   1. Is our website providing a good user experience? How easy do we make it for someone to get in touch?
   2. Does our website talk directly to our CRM so that web enquiries are pushed automatically into a central database providing a single source of truth, or do they sit within an email inbox where they could potentially get lost and manual processing is required?
   3. Do we use UTM links for digital campaign activity and have we set up goals in Google Analytics so we can track behaviour and conversions?

You may even want to use a measurable rating scale when assessing some of these building blocks so you have a comparable way of identifying and prioritising areas of improvement. Here’s an example:

Vision: How closely aligned are our marketing goals with our business’ goals?

1 = We don’t really know the business goals and don’t have any marketing goals

5 = We have marketing goals but they may not be aligned to our business goals

10 = Marketing goals are completely aligned to our business goals

And finally, when you look across all your marketing assets (website content, social channels, sales presentations, brochures, leaflets, videos, adverts etc etc etc) are you…

• Communicating the value and impact of doing business with you – with your ideal customer(s) in mind?
• Consistent with your messaging and including clear calls to action?
• Consistent with the creative execution of your brand and your tone of voice?

So, how do you bring all this together?

1. Once you’ve completed your marketing audit you should have identified what’s working for, and against you, and what things you might not have even thought about before!
2. From this you can work up a gap analysis thinking about your ‘ideal future state’ for each of the building blocks and identify where the minor, moderate, and major gaps are
3. Then it’s time to convert this gap analysis into an action plan that will enable you to build a marketing ecosystem that’s aligned to your business goals and will drive the reliable growth you’re looking for… but make sure you bring everyone along for the ride for even greater strategic impact!

But don’t worry if you haven’t got the capacity to take care of this for yourselves – it’s what we love to do for our clients everyday.

Just get in touch and we’ll be happy to take the hassle out of it for you… and we’ll even have some fun along the way!

We can even deliver your action plan too if you like!? What can we say… we’re completer-finishers!

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