To successfully market your business and its products and services, you need to make sure that your marketing team understand your business inside and out. Without this in-depth understanding marketing is much more likely to be unsuccessful. If your marketers don’t know what your business is about, then how will the potential leads? This article outlines the eight key areas that are crucial to a successful marketing team and are the cornerstone to marketing your business itself.
1. Understanding of the target market
Make sure that you have a fully researched and analysed your target markets. This is the pinnacle of marketing, if you have poorly researched or are vague on your target markets then you run the risk of wasting your efforts trying to sell to the wrong people. This can be absolutely catastrophic, as shown during The Apprentice 2013, during which team Endeavour created a ready meal for children called ‘Deadly Dinners’. This was a huge success with the children who were fascinated by the spooky theme. What they failed to take into consideration is that, ultimately, it was the parents that would have to buy the ready meals for the children. Needless to say, the parents thought that giving children food with toxic skulls on the packaging was unsuitable. That was a prime example of failing to accommodate to both the target markets; the children to eat them and the parents who have the ultimate decision on what their children eat.
The different target consumers can be identified as a ‘Buyer Persona’ these personas are characters that your marketing team can use to advertise to. They are made to be the perfect customer; they are given names, jobs, home backgrounds etc. These full character profiles should cover everyone that your business already targets, or would like to target. Businesses should ideally have between five and eight buyer personas, and should include both the customer and the consumer. As you know, who buys the product may not be the person who actually uses it (just like the Apprentice example). Using Buyer Personas is definitely something that your marketing team should be using when creating any content for your marketing campaign.
2. Knowledge of the products or services
Understanding your products/services and why they are beneficial to your consumers allows you to be able to pick the key selling points of your business and its USP. Everyone in your marketing team needs to be able to state why your product is different and how that makes it stand out from the rest.
3. Knowledge of sales
When marketing your product or service you need to be aware of your product sales for a number of reasons. Here are some of the sales figures that you’re marketing team need to be aware of:
What are the expected sales of your product?
Being aware of the amount of sales you are aiming to get from your marketing campaign will help you to allocate your budget to the most effective outlay.
How much increase per year?
For a growing and healthy business, sales should be set to increase every year, and this should be done by using techniques implemented by your marketing team. Targets give everyone something to aim for and can help to focus your energies onto a specific area of your business. This can be determined by looking at the average increase across your company’s lifetime, and if your business is not doing as well as it should, or is very new you should then look at businesses in similar industries and areas to you for ideas.
Where do the sales come from?
Understanding where the majority of your sales come from is essential for your marketing team. This can help you to accurately allocate your marketing resources and help you to understand where to focus your resources. This may be an analysis as to whether your sales are mainly return custom, digital advertising or traditional forms of marketing. Every piece of marketing should be accurately measured from start to finish.
Cost per sale?
Working out the cost of each sale is also a useful tool for your marketing team to know. For the best results this needs to be done in detail. This can be a time consuming process but once you have set it up it is very worthwhile. The best option is just to ask any enquiries or sales that you have where they found out about you, the more specific the better. With this information you can then analyse how much each sale costs and which areas generate the most sales.
4. Understanding of digital
Not only knowing what it is, but to understand how to use digital marketing to the best of its ability is a crucial part of your marketing plan. This means that your Marketing team need to be competent in using the digital marketing tools available from website analytics tracking to SEO and using a variety of social media sites that are suitable for the business.
5. KPIs and reporting
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a marking point that you can use to analyse the success of a campaign or project. There are many different types of KPI’s that businesses measure, here are a few examples:
- Quantitative KPIs – Shown by a number
- Leading KPIs – Predictions of the outcome of a project
- Directional KPIs – Indicate whether a business is successful or not
Using these KPIs is a great performance measuring system for your marketing team. This will alert them to any targets that they need to hit and give them time to assess why they weren’t successful, work on it, and hit the targets. KPIs can be made from many different things; including increasing likes or follows on your social accounts by five a week, for example.
6. Analysis of your competitors in your market / industry
Without knowing exactly who your competitions are within your industry then you are unable to provide a good analysis of what they are doing in regards to marketing. Using competitor analysis can give you great ideas for your own marketing strategy and help you to identify areas that you can play up on a campaign, which differentiate you from your competition.
7. A clear and focused marketing plan
Planning your marketing strategy should be done regularly, depending on the industry that you are in. This plan outlines what task you intend to focus on, whether it is different target customers, products or marketing tools. This planning will also help you to continually focus, evaluate and adapt your marketing plan where needed. This flexible approach to marketing can help you react to changes in taste and public opinion sooner, and stay ahead of the competition. For example, if you are in the fair trade fashion industry and a large news story comes out about sweatshops – you want to make sure that you make full use of the opportunity to market your fair trade roots! More on creating marketing plans can be found here: Build a Pipeline of Qualified Leads and Enquiries With Inbound Marketing
8-Planned marketing budgets
Assessment of how much you are spending on different aspects of your marketing budget is essential and do need to be reviewed regularly. This means that you are able to manipulate the most cost effective marketing spends to get more return across the channels that you use. This budget needs to be agreed and monitored to make sure that you are utilising them the best was possible and avoid over spending. If you re looking for cost effective ways to market your business take a look at this article about marketing on a budget: 7 Free Or Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Businesses On A Budget
If you want to find out more about Internet marketing and how it can generate sales, please have a look here at our articles about Internet Marketing.
Article By: Katie Torrance
