Marketing is a process, not an event. Too often, marketing gets confused with sales and becomes a series of (often) disconnected campaigns focussed on driving enquiries. This is sales promotion. Marketing is the process of building awareness of your business and proposition across your target markets and developing a solid understanding of the real value you deliver. The more your potential customers know and trust your business and appreciate how they can benefit from working with you, the easier it is to sell to them when the time is right To be effective your marketing needs to be consistent and sustained. How consistent is your marketing? These 5 simple questions will help you find out:
1. Do you have clear business objectives?
One of the biggest barriers to consistent marketing is the lack of defined objectives. Without clear goals as to what you want to achieve and a strategy as to how you are going to market your business to achieve these goals, it is very difficult to deliver consistent, sustained and joined-up marketing communications. Without clear objectives, marketing can become a series of disjointed activities driven by the Next Big Marketing Thing (Adwords, SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing etc. etc.).
2. Do you really understand your value proposition?
While your objectives help define your strategy – and even why you are in business at all, your value proposition is the essence of why people will want to do business with you. It sets out the benefit you deliver to solve people’s problems and/or make their lives easier and more enjoyable. Do you understand your value proposition and how it helps your business to stand out?
3. Do you have a communication plan?
What are you trying to communicate to the market? Do you measure your marketing content against this? When you put out a message through any media, you should be clear if and how that fits in with your value proposition and the brand that you are trying to build within your marketplace. Furthermore, your communications plan should look ahead to tell you:
- What you are going to say.
- When you are going to say it.
- What channels you are going to use.
- Who you are targeting.
- Why you are sending this message to these targets.
To be consistent the plan should look at least 6 months ahead. 12 months is better.
4. Do you stick at it?
When you commit to pro-active marketing communications (eg Email, Twitter, Social Media, Offline (don’t forget mailshot, telemarketing etc) do you then consistently feed this with great content? This reinforces your position as an expert delivering real benefit to your marketplace. It’s not so much about how often you communicate. Focus on consistently putting out great content.
5. Do you review and refine your activity?
A strategy and its associated communications plan are no good if they are written and then put on a shelf. They should be living, working documents. Are you doing what you said you’d do? Is this getting you where you want to go? So, your marketing activity should be continually reviewed as a core element of your management process and refined & tuned as you get feedback from the marketplace on your activities. Answer YES to all 5 of these questions then you are on the way to driving Consistent Marketing – Congratulations! If you think your marketing could benefit from being more consistent, give us a call on 01457 851111 or contact us here
