Making sure the impact of marketing is seen in black & white, when everything about marketing can be perceived as a gray area.
The big question (and hundreds of small questions)
"How effectively does our business’ marketing support our commercial strategy?" This is a question every board of management wants to have a definitive answer to.
But the answers they get are often not black and white. They are gray.
Why is this? There is a perception that marketing is a “gray area”. That it is not black and white – that there are no rights and wrongs - just different paths to market.
It is hard for the perception of success to be black & white, when marketing as a whole is often perceived as a gray area.
How can management teams get the answers they need?
1. Accept that there are right & wrong ways to market your business
It is true that there are lots of ways to market a business, but only if you are not sure about what you want to achieve or who your customers are. If you:
• know who is most likely to use your service or products and
• have a good idea what you want your business to look like in 3 years
then there is a right and a wrong way to market.
Anything that does not engage those people and build towards your vision for your business is wrong.
People get very focused on channels – “we need to do more with digital”, “we need more sales people on the ground”, “we need to do more public speaking” – but can forget to think about how these may or may not help to meet goals and client interests.
Admittedly, it is hard to know what is absolutely right, but knowing what is wrong is half the battle. For example:
• Running print campaigns in local mainstream business media, when your target audience are international investors (but your Chairman likes being in the publication) WRONG
• Using Facebook as the lynchpin of your business’ communications when your target audience are businesses with CRM requirements (but all your colleagues promise to “like” your posts) WRONG
Once you know what is not going to work, everything else you do should:
• focus on access to clients by going to where they are already
• have rationale as to how it supports business goals
• be measured and delivered consistently
until it is proven to work - or needs to be tweaked.
2. Trust in marketing as a discipline - equal to science, law or tax
We often advise management teams to stop thinking about marketing as a matter of opinion and start applying the same rigour to marketing as you do to tax, science or law.
How?
By relying on a code of practice, hiring trusted experts and auditing annually.
Code: There is a marketing code of practice (research, analyse, target, plan, measure, tweak, repeat)
Expertise: You employ marketing experts to tailor the code of practice to your business
Audit: Just as you would do an annual audit of accounts, a marketing audit ensures you are a) following the code of practice and b) that day-to-day activity and organisational goals align.
3. Stop planning in a vaccuum
We have seen many marketing plans that are smartly attuned to market trends and competitor analysis, but bear no connection to the business’s strategic vision. This can be due to:
• a breakdown in communication on the strategy between management and the marketing team
• a lack of understanding of commercial goals vs marketing goals
• not having an advocate of the commercial strategy on the marketing team
Worse, but all too often, marketing plans are a paper exercise, never reviewed or measured again until the following year. And in the interim, everyone gets to comment on and tweak any or all of the ongoing marketing work. And then wonder why goals were not met.
Rather than being able to respond to this from a position of strength – saying “this is what we have agreed is the best course of action to achieve our goals of X, Y, Z and we need to give this x months to test effectiveness before we look at alternatives”, marketing teams are often unsure of why they are doing what they are doing. They do not measure consistently enough. They are easily swayed because they aren’t sure what path they are even swaying from!
They are marketing in gray.
We recommend businesses revise planning processes with a marketing audit mindset to ensure alignment between marketing and commercial goals.
Marketing audits: Moving from Gray to Black & White
Going back to the question every board of management wants to know the answer to: How effectively business marketing supports commercial strategy?
An audit-based approach will provide definitive answers to this question. Marketing audits ensure marketing plans and programmes are grounded in fact and reality – just like any other audit.
Using market & client research, relationship measurement, data analytics & financial analysis, an audit measures the execution of the plan to assess outcomes against commercial goals. A marketing audit dovetails with your marketing planning process and monitors ongoing marketing programmes to make sure they are:
• robust (defendable relevance to clients) and
• fit for purpose (help to achieve commercial goals)
When you hold your clients and your business goals at the centre of your marketing, the results should no longer be a gray area – they should be black & white.