Knowing how to ask the right questions can mean the difference between night and day for your marketing strategy. Knowing which are the effective marketing questions is gold. Dale Beaumont interviewed Jane Toohey, along with business partner Michelle Gamble, and out came the gold.
Jane and Michelle share the right questions to ask in order to have an effective marketing strategy. In 2001, with Michelle based in Sydney and Jane in Melbourne, the pair created Marketing Angels, a marketing consultancy that develops and implements marketing strategies for small to medium enterprises.
What questions should people ask in order to create an effective marketing strategy?
- What are your business objectives? – to create brand awareness? Generate leads? Increase revenue? Increase customer spend? It is important to get clear on what you want to achieve and establish specific measures. For example, if your business wants to increase brand awareness, a measure might be a ten per cent increase in the number of visits to the website and a 15 per cent increase in phone call enquiries.
- What’s the perception of your brand and how do people think you are different? – when customers think about your brand name, what comes to mind? Whatever it is, that is the current perception of your brand. Asking people how they perceive you as being different helps you get clear on your actual differentiation. If their perception is different to your objective for the brand, there is obviously work to be done!
- How do people find out about products and services similar to the type you sell? – knowing how people seek out services and products helps you focus your marketing effort. If word of mouth is the most significant way, then your efforts need to focus heavily on raising brand awareness and developing customer relationship management programs to maximise word of mouth among your current customers. If the internet is a significant way then you need to ensure you have a website that effectively communicates what you do, how you do it, what’s available and makes it easy for people to make an enquiry or purchase from you. If it’s through direct approaches then you need to ensure you have a strong and effective direct marketing program. If it’s through the media then you need to know what media your prospective customer reads regularly and focus on some public relations activities – offer to provide articles and perhaps support them with some paid advertising in these mediums.
- How are you going to implement your strategies? – put together a budget and implementation plan to get a sense of the resources required to get the marketing activities underway. Is this achievable given your resources? Do you need to outsource some of the work or scale back the program? Do you need to review your objectives according to what’s realistic?
Too many marketing plans sit on the shelf gathering dust because the implementation phase has been completely left out! For more of this interview check out “Secrets of Marketing Experts Exposed!“.
