This question and answer series of articles provides scenarios for business owners to find answers to business frustrations. Today we discuss marketing strategies.
Q: My operations manager has also taken on the responsibility of managing the marketing for our business, however, I am not sure how to guide him or how to advise him on marketing strategies. And right now we need it. Help!
Big question, but I will try to condense the answer down to its salient points. The real key to marketing is measuring. Measure everything.
First of all, you can start by looking at where your best business has come from in the past. Which marketing initiatives have been most effective? Which haven’t? Do you know if the reason they didn’t work was a direct result of the actual message or the channel you used to spread the message? Sometimes the message can be right, but the channel way off beam in terms of reaching your target market .. and vice versa. List your various marketing channels: database, referrals, website, advertising and so on. Then examine how many leads came from each method? What percentage of them were qualified leads and matched your target market? What percentage of those converted to business? And don’t just look at the business you won. Look equally as critically at the business you didn’t win and why.
Only once you know in actual numbers what’s been occurring can you hope to improve on the processes that generated those numbers and from that determine a sound strategy.
Simply armed with those figures and information, you can plan a lot and fine tune the two key elements of your sales process – how you generate leads and how you convert leads.
If the qualified leads are there and they are not being converted in satisfactory numbers, then you may need to rethink or retrain your people in using a more effective lead conversion process.
Another valuable resource for fine tuning your processes and your service is what your clients think. Do you ask them for feedback and analyse it?
Discuss all of this with your manager and develop a plan to gather all of this information.
Watch for Part Thirty-Four of the Q & A series…coming later this week!
Until next time…
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