In today’s economy, every dollar you spend on marketing must produce results. Are you sure that the marketing you spend money on is working?
As a new year approaches, this is a perfect time for a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a cost-effective review process where an expert looks at your marketing strategy, tactics, and results to make sure you are getting the best results possible without wasting money. Here are some of the things we’ve found in marketing audits:
No marketing integration. Sometimes marketing programs grow one tactic at a time. A business creates a website, and then begins a separate effort to send out email newsletters to customers. The messaging and the graphics on the website don’t match that of the emails. Sometimes the reason for this is because the website was created by a vendor, email campaigns are created in-house, and there is no one to coordinate the efforts. Without a plan to integrate the look, feel and messaging of all marketing tactics, you cannot reap the proven benefits of integrated marketing programs.
Bad strategy. Many companies want to market to a broad audience or the wrong audience. In a broad marketplace there is intense competition, and it’s hard to stand out. One of our clients decided to position themselves in a big marketplace, when in fact they were the leading experts in a niche market within that big marketplace. The dollars they spent trying to compete with the big guys would have been much better spent on marketing their niche expertise.
The wrong results. We’ve seen businesses that use tactics that get a lot of response, but they generate unqualified leads. For example, one of our B2B clients published blog posts about popular events, hoping to increase readership. We found that while visitors would land on their blog, they rarely stayed or looked at more information, because they were interested in the events not in our clients’ business. In B2B marketing, quality of the leads is more important than quantity.
Are you doing the right marketing, to the right people, getting the right results? New Incite offers marketing audits – a shortened version of our Marketing Situation Analysis – as a cost-effective solution for today’s business owner.
