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How Good Is Your Marketing?

Forget your marketing expenditure for a minute - it's all about delivering says guru, Robert Craven

 

Marketing is often evaluated on how much they have spent on it or how pretty their brochures look. Forget them now. These criteria seem somewhat superfluous.  The purpose of marketing is to get more clients to buy from you… or to get existing clients to stay with you and buy more. What you really need to measure is marketing effectiveness (and not the inputs or costs).

 

"a simple yet effective way of finding and satisfying customers is certainly required"

DO YOU DELIVER?

When evaluating your marketing, measure its effectiveness – does it deliver the results you want?  Do not confuse sizzle with the steak.  Measure outputs and results.

Marketing is not an exercise in creating beautifully crafted works of art - unless that will get you more business!.  Marketing is not an intellectually attractive process for stimulating the sensory sensitivities of an artistic director. 

Marketing is all about communicating with potential and existing clients - getting them to buy from you rather than from your competitors.  With that in mind, please score yourself in the box below!

 

It's a fact that Marketing, as it is commonly presented, is failing to deliver. 

Talk to almost any businessperson that has just come out of a marketing seminar.  They resent the intellectually fascinating but unearthed, disconnected way that the subject relates to real actions.

As most smart-assed marketing books claim, a new paradigm (read ‘rhetoric’) is required.  Well, a simple, yet effective way of finding and satisfying is certainly required!!! But it doesn’t need to be rocket science.  You ’re probably familiar with the tools and techniques that work but you may have forgotten how to measure and evaluate them.

The Problems

The following comments are pretty standard;you've almost certainly muttered some of them yourself in the past few months!

• ‘Our pricing is easily matched/bettered by our competitors who seem to surpass and outflank us…’
• ‘Advertising is getting more expensive and less effective; too much time and money is spent on sales promotion and we don't know how effective it is...’
• ‘We’re in the wrong business – maybe we should be web designers ‘cos they seem to be making all the money…’
• ‘Sales force costs are rising...’
• ‘Our so-called ‘innovative’ projects often don't look much different from those of our competitors...’
• ‘A lot is being given away...’
• ‘We don't have a clear view of the future...’

TIME FOR ACTION

It's time to take action. Marketing like any other business investment - evaluate the cost and benefit, the inputs and outputs - and establish what works most effectively for you.

about the author

 Robert Craven is a keynote speaker, MD of The Directors' Centre consultancy and author of the business best-sellers 'Kick-Start Your Business' and 'Customer Is King'. His new book is Bright Marketing - why should people bother to buy from you?. He has recently been described as 'one of the UK’s leading marketing specialists' and the 'entrepreneurship guru'. He runs The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Robert Craven on 01225 851044. (rc@directorscentre.com) www.directorscentre.com

Robert Craven©2007, Growing Business Magazine

publication details

First published in Growing Business, Sept 2007.