Are you bench-marking your marketing efforts? So you’ve decided to invest in your business by increasing your marketing budget. You’ve come up with the funds, run the sum by the finance department, and you’re ready to invest.
But before you spend another dollar on marketing, make sure you, your marketing team, and your business’ decision makers are on the same page and have a solid understanding of your existing marketing resources and performance. Make sure the marketing plan reflects the organization’s top overarching business goals and make sure your marketing goals are attainable.
It’s critical to have the elements in place that will enable your team to reach its goals. By the time you’re done the assessment, you should know the strength of your existing website, brand, business model, marketing technology, team, and processes. You should also have an idea how much work needs to be done to enable the type of results you’re aiming for.
You should aim to find out how extensive your reach is and the extent of your influence among key audiences, such as customers, leads, partners, peers, media, and employees. You should know your top performing campaigns, and what kind of results have they historically generated.
Once that is established, you’re probably eager to get started. Keep in mind that you can put money into advertising, hire a social media specialist and get a communications strategist, but you should never sit back and assume that your efforts are increasing sales for your business.
First, you should establish what your current efforts are doing.
Look first at your emails. You probably send out marketing emails to your customer base and prospective customers.
Your email system will track your open rates and click rates. Once you have the numbers, try to raise them. Even a seemingly simple tactic like segmentation of your email newsletters can have a great positive impact, because people like to think their emails are personalized to them. It makes them feel like you know them. Optimized marketing and sending fewer irrelevant emails will help your customers pay more attention when you do have something important to communicate. Your emails should include offers, deals, information, or a call to action. If not, ask yourself why are you sending the email.
Next, look at your web analytics on your website. Your website can generate statistics showing how visitors behave and which pages are encouraging purchases, donations, or clicks.
Marketing research like this can not only help you to identify what is working, it shows you what isn’t, and what isn’t worth the monetary investment. Benchmarking can also help you identify where your competitive edge lies and how you can capitalise on it.
By evaluating your current business and marketing performance, you can devise the right marketing strategies and allocate time, money and resources to the right places.
Let Holistic Hub Websites & Marketing Services make your evaluation process simple with our FREE 20 minute consultation Call (408) 992-5529. We will help you determine the right places for your marketing strategies today! Contact us for a FREE 20-minute needs analysis today. .