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| The New Role of Marketing |
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Is Your Team Up For It? 10 Tips On How To Get Your Marketing To Become An Actionable & Measurable Implementation Tool The Goal. There is one simple goal that is common to all business: bring in as many repeat customers as possible, and bring in new customers, while using this mix to grow the company. Your marketing activities have a financial impact on the bottom line of your company. Since marketing should design and implement tactics that will secure new clients that directly generate revenue and growth, it also communicates services to help existing clients understand how the company can further grow their business through the addition of marketing, advertising, and technology services that measure marketing effectiveness. The Tool. Your marketing leader is responsible to listen to ideas and then perform the market research needed to determine the effectiveness and return on investment of those ideas. Based on that feedback, you will be able to fine-tune, implement, and strategize to come up with other options to your product/service. The old principles of mass marketing no longer apply. There have been two primary changes in marketing in marketing over the past few years; one reflects the need to segment the audience that is a direct result of the increasing number of media alternatives. This is causing marketers to totally reconsider the way they are spending money. The result of these new sources of entertainment significantly changes the return on investment associated with producing and placing an ad. There is no longer a guarantee that the promised segment of the audience will actually view your expensive ad, or listen to your expensive commercial. The second significant change is the evolving role of the marketing leader, which today is much broader in focus and tied more closely than ever to overall company strategy. The demands on marketers are increasing exponentially. A marketing leader must extend his reach well beyond the traditional roles of brand development, advertising, PR, and events management. The charter now extends to sales empowerment, product innovation, pricing, and competitive analysis. All these areas must be prioritized and aligned with overall corporate strategy. Marketing should not be viewed as the department that sells commodities. When a company sells commodities, the prime distinguishing factor is not product features, but instead price. The more obvious creative aspects of marketing that were leading for many years, such as advertising, but the fact is, creativity in marketing can come in many forms, from innovating and positioning new products to developing sales incentive programs and product placement. Marketing today is definitely a science, built on quantifiable data. Like science, marketing knowledge derives from analysis and testing; it must be verifiable by empirical results. You always have to be prepared to adapt your tactics as the data is refreshed. The most important question the marketing leader can ask is “Why?” Why did a focus group respond to one service and not to another? Why did one sales promotion succeed and another fail? Marketing executives can’t be afraid to ask the hard questions, and they must be very, very fast learners. If they aren’t the company suffers. Maximize the wins and minimize the losses. What is dangerous is not listening to the audience; the voice of the customer is critical to success. It is essential to track your expenditures to effectively evaluate program success or failure. With this information, a marketing leader can review allocations and compare spending against return in specific areas. Only with hard facts like these can marketing make wise, flexible budgetary decisions. Evaluating business on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is important for marketing to be open to the change that happens every day in business. Constantly testing strategies and tactics against your objectives is important, because testing provides marketers with a way to determine whether altering a strategy would be more effective. Many write an annual marketing plan and then strictly adhere to it. Business moves too fast to make decisions only once a year. Having a plan is critical, since this is where you articulate your goals and objectives. With every marketing decision, another strategy marketers should employ is to try and determine a return on investment before making the decision. Ultimately, with many decisions in marketing, it is important to also analyze the return on objective of a project. It is important to interact with customers and suppliers on many levels. This is where you get your information and feedback as to how your company, product/service and sales, customer service and other departments are doing. This input allows you to be more on-target with your decision-making regarding product/service changes and alternations. The goal is to sell. Position the product/service in a way that can be sold. And then sell more. |