It may be from a lack of marketing experience or expertise within the company, or it may be that the person driving the marketing has so much on their to-do-list they are struggling to keep all their plates spinning. Whatever the reason, this trend can lead to missed opportunities and/or a loss of time and money.

A key step to overcoming this problem is making sure every channel within the marketing mix has a clearly defined purpose, in line with the marketing and business-level goals and objectives. Tips for how to do this are outlined below.

Understand the ‘What’

To make an informed marketing channel selection, it’s important to first familiarise yourself with the marketing channels available. Beyond simply knowing they exist, you should also explore deeper to identify what goals each channel is best suited to help accomplish.

Further, as budget is a key consideration when planning the marketing strategy for a business, it’s important to understand the expected costs associated with each channel.

Clarify the ‘Who’

Marketers are becoming more aware of the need to understand ‘who’ they are targeting, to guide more strategic marketing decisions. To identify which channels will be best suited to reaching the right audience, you must first have a comprehensive understanding of who that target audience is, including:

• A top-level understanding, defining the overarching market;
• Identification of the key target market segments (or groups) that exist within that overarching market; and
• A detailed understanding of the characteristics and preferences of each target market segment (i.e. a ‘profile’ for each segment).

Identify the ‘Why’

Every business decision should be tied to the overarching business objectives. Before selecting marketing channels, both the business objectives and the marketing objectives should be clarified and understood. This will allow you to consider how each marketing channel can help you achieve these objectives, and then set clear goals and KPIs for exactly what you want to achieve through each channel – giving each channel a clear purpose, driven by your objectives, with metrics by which to measure success.

Monitor and Analyse

Tracking must be correctly set up across all selected channels to ensure the data can be recorded to measure performance. Creating a monitoring and measurement plan in line with the KPIs is a good step to take. This plan should clarify which metrics will be measured and what methods will be used for measurement (e.g. Google Analytics to measure conversions on the website).

You should then analyse the success of each channel at regular intervals and adjust approach based on performance insights. This shouldn’t be a case of set and forget, and you should continue to consider if there is anything you should analyse that you haven’t thought of before. You should also continue to consider the purpose that each channel is serving and review your channel strategy in line with the performance insights.

The post Flying blind? How to nail your marketing channel selection appeared first on Reload Consulting.

When a business is started, the goal is always to sell the most goods/services possible to make a profit. While selling is doable even without a marketing strategy in place, the problem is that the business loses out on opportunities for awareness, sales and growth without that strategy. Whether you are about to launch a business, or your business has been operating for months, years or even decades; having a marketing strategy can lead the business to success.

Below are signs that may indicate that your business needs a marketing strategy.
• You are launching your business;
• You are developing a new product or service;
• Sales are declining;
• Sales are not picking up; or
• Sales are good and you are now ready to expand to a new market or locations.

In developing a marketing strategy, there are certain areas of the business that need to be reviewed and taken into consideration.

Overarching business objectives – The marketing strategy should be an extension of the overarching objectives of the business. The business objectives will dictate the direction of the marketing initiatives that need to be implemented in order to achieve the goals of the business. Moreover, it is always helpful to be guided by the mission and vision of the company, if any has been set.

Resources and Requirements – The financial capacity, human capital, technology infrastructure and other assets and limitations of the business should be considered when crafting the marketing strategy as these will affect the kind of activities that the business will be able to implement and take part in.

Environmental Influencers – The surrounding conditions that may affect the way a business operates or its chances of success in the market need to be analysed and taken into account prior to developing the marketing strategy. These environmental factors include competitors, socio-economic conditions, political situation and technological advancements.

The business SWOT – The business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) play a big part in dictating the direction that a company should take in marketing. When a business is aware of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, a strategy that capitalises on its strengths and takes advantage of the opportunities can be developed. Knowing the business’ weakness and threats will allow the business to take action and correct and or protect against them.

Marketing Objectives – These refer to the goals that the business wants to achieve, specific to marketing. Some examples include awareness, increase in sales, increase in conversions, etc.

Target Market – The customers to whom the product or service is aimed at make up the target market. The factors determining how the customers decide on purchasing a product, their preferences, and even their purchasing journey are important elements to consider in crafting a marketing strategy.

Marketing mix – This refers to the strategic tools a business uses to achieve desired reactions from its target market. It comprises of the four Ps of marketing: Product, Pricing, Place and Promotion.

A marketing strategy essentially provides a business with focus and direction for getting its product or service to the market in the most effective way. Further, it serves as a foundation for all marketing and communication initiatives.

Having a marketing strategy in place can yield the following benefits for your business:
• Help identify the best opportunities for and threats to the business;
• Identify the strengths of the businesses that can be capitalised on and weaknesses that need to be improved;
• Identify the overarching marketing goal of the business;
• Plan out the marketing activities needed and resources required for these activities;
• Identify the best means to roll out marketing initiatives,
• Gain a better understanding of the business’ target market (through market research);
• Give marketing campaigns a focus;
• Help develop a consistent level of brand recognition amongst the business’ target market;
• Tie in the company’s vision, mission, objectives to the marketing initiatives; and, ultimately
• Increase sales and profits.

An important note to remember is that having a marketing strategy is just half of the equation to meeting your objectives. Implementation of the strategy is crucial to meeting success.

The post 10 reasons why you need a marketing strategy appeared first on Reload Consulting.

Titus Maccius Plautus, a roman playwright who lived from 254 BC to 184 BC once said that “You must spend money to make money.” Not everyone agrees with this saying. However, if you are a business owner and you are spending money, you would want to know if the investment that you’ve made was worth it. Marketing is often an expense that a business cannot do without as it is the means by which a company can get the word out on its product/s or services. It can get very expensive especially in the first year of the business. For this reason, it is vital that all marketing efforts are monitored to see what kind of results are achieved for the dollars spent on the activities or campaigns. With the various tools available for measuring the output of marketing, especially those conducted online, you can easily track the performance of your marketing activities. However, if you are not selective with the data that you monitor, you’ll end up with mountains and mountains of information, some of which you don’t really need. What then are the marketing metrics that matter? Below is a list of the marketing metrics that you should be measuring according to your preferred channel for promotion.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising generally refers to promotion done through mediums such as TV, print, billboard, radio, phone, and direct mail. In measuring the effectiveness of the campaign advertised through these mediums, it would be essential to set key performance indicators or goals prior to launching the campaigns. The effectiveness of the campaign can then be determined based on whether or not these KPIs were met. For each of these traditional channels, good indicators for the level of awareness that can be achieved are the number of listeners (for radio), number of viewers (for TV), number of subscribers (for direct mail), number of cars that pass (for the billboard). On the other hand, if the goal is to increase sales, then the number of sales (relative to the goal set for this) after the campaign was launched is a good indicator of how successful it is.

New/Current Methods

The internet has broadened the playing field for reaching people. The online marketing channels and methods that are commonly used as well as the metrics by which to measure the effectiveness of a marketing activity or campaign are discussed below.

Website

Nowadays, having a website is crucial to the success of any business. It is a means by which customers find your business and an avenue for conducting marketing and sales activities. The most important metrics to measure on your website include:

• Total Sessions – This refers to traffic that your website is getting. Total sessions measure the number of times your website was visited over a period of time. An increase in sessions is an indicator that your website is performing better and that your business is achieving broader brand awareness.
• New and Returning Visitors – New visitors pertain to the first time users of your website during a given time frame while returning visitors refer to those who have already been to the site previously. Having a large portion of returning visitors is an indicator that your customers find reasons to go back to your website whether to get more information, engage or purchase (if an e-commerce site).
• Traffic Source – Users arrive at websites from many different sources. Measuring the traffic source will tell you if your users were led to the website via an organic search, through a referral, from social site, through a paid campaign (such as AdWords) or if a user came direct.
• Bounce Rate – This refers to the percentage of users that leave your website without generating a second interaction (generally a page view). A high bounce rate may indicate that the entry page is not as effective as it should be in capturing the interest of the user to explore your site further.
• Conversion Rate – This measures the rate at which users covert on the site. Conversions are set up to be the desired action that you would like a user to take that generally represent an action of value to the business. Examples of conversions include; filling out an enquiry form, subscribing to a mailing list, purchasing a product/s, making a donation among others.
• Time on site – The length of time a user stays on a website is a good indicator of the user’s interest in what the website has to offer or. Users tend to stay on a website longer when they find its contents engaging or are on the website to perform or complete a transaction. This depends on the purpose of the website however as support sites aim to solve problems and answer questions quickly so a lower time on site would actually be a positive metric.
• Page Views per Session – The number of page views a user makes on a website is said to point to the engagement level of the user on that website. The more pages a user views, indicates his or her interest in the contents of the site. However sometimes having a lower number of pages per session actually means that users are finding the information they are looking for more effectively.

Email Marketing

Marketing through emails is an easy and effective way to reach customers. The metrics that you would want to monitor are:

• Click Through Rate – This lets you gauge the performance of each email that has been sent out to your customer by looking at the number of people engaging with your content and how. What they click on in an email will determine what content they are interested in.
• Conversion Rate – As stated earlier, is the rate at which a customer performs an action that you want them to take. These actions may include filling out a form, downloading content or visiting your website.
• Growth of Email List and Unsubscribe Rate – A growing email list gives you a chance to reach more people and deliver targeted messages. A declining list points to problems with the content that you are disseminating.
• Hard and Soft Bounces –  An email that “bounces” is an email that has not been delivered due to varied reason. Hard bounces are caused by a permanent issue such as invalid email addresses while soft bounces are due to a temporary issue such as when a recipient’s mailbox is full.

Social Media Campaigns

• Engagement – This refers to actions done within a social media account such as likes, shares, and comments.
• Inbound links – This will allow you to determine the effectiveness of your social activities and campaigns in bringing people to your website.
• Sentiment – The feelings, attitudes, and opinions of your brand can be measured through the conversations that take place within the social media accounts. This will give you a chance to understand your customers better and see how your brand is perceived.

Paid Search and Display Metrics

• Click through Rate – This will indicate if your ads are relevant to those searching and whether or not your key word or creative representations are effective. Moreover, the click through rate will have a major impact on your Quality Score (Google’s measure of your keyword’s relevance).
• Conversion Rate – The number of people who clicked your ad and went on to perform an action determines the conversation rate a customer.

Overarching Marketing Metrics

Outlined below are the marketing metrics that you should be monitoring regardless of whether or not the promotional activities are done online or offline.

• Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) – As marketing is a big expense, it should be treated similar to an investment wherein, the returns will only materialise after a certain period of time and the cost is somewhat amortised over a period of time. Return on Marketing Investment measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. The computation to get the ROMI is gross profit minus marketing expense divided by marketing investment.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – Simply put, this is the cost that you incur to acquire a customer. This metric is important as it can indicate the scalability and profitability of your company. To get your CPA, divide the marketing spend on a particular activity or campaign by the number of customers acquired. Essentially, you would want to retain the activities that cost less to retain a customer in order to have a higher profit margin.
• Customer Attrition Rate – Customer attrition rate or customer churn rate is the number of customers that drop from your client base. By knowing your customer attrition rate, you will know your customer retention rate. Being aware of your attrition rate will enable you to determine what you need to do to compensate for this loss (i.e. how many new customers need to be acquired to make up for the loss). It is ideal to keep your attrition rate down as this will mean a higher number of customers in your pipeline, higher sales and therefore, higher revenue.
• Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC) – This is the average lifespan of your customer or how long a customer remains loyal to your company. There are multiple ways of computing the lifetime value of a customer. One way is to multiply the average amount that a customer spends per transaction by the number of repeat sales and by the average retention time.

The above are the core metrics that should be measured based on our experience and is not a comprehensive list of metrics that can be measured for all marketing activities. An important point to remember that when choosing the metrics to measure, these metrics should be aligned with the goals that you have set for your marketing activity or campaign from the get-go.

The post Marketing Metrics which matter most (Part 2) appeared first on Reload Consulting.

Increase in sales – Selling is the ultimate goal of operating a business. The sales performance for both online and offline activities – whether it is increasing, on a plateau or not meeting targets – should be measured. This should be done periodically and measured against previous months or against sales made on the same period in the previous year/s. Online sales will be easier to measure as e-commerce websites have the ability to track revenue through e-commerce tracking. On the other hand, offline sales might need to be monitored manually.

Increase brand awareness – Brand awareness can spark curiosity among potential customers. This may encourage them to get more information about your business. For online activities, the metrics to keep an eye on are website traffic, page views, downloads, mentions on social media and referral links. Offline, you can measure foot traffic, prompted awareness and unprompted awareness.

Generate new leads – If the end goal is sales or brand awareness, leads are generally a secondary goal in order to fill the sales funnel or indicate interest in your brand offering. To determine the number of leads generated, you can look into form submissions, email sign-ups and phone calls.

Customer retention – It is more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain them. Thus, your business will benefit from having loyal customers. To be able to track your customer retention, you can use metrics such as renewal (membership or subscription) rates, re-orders, and re-visits to the website.

Engagement – By getting a sense of how customers perceive your product and/or service, you will have an opportunity to see what is currently working in terms of your marketing efforts and what needs to be improved or removed. Blog comments, the number of inbound links, likes, shares, etc. can give you such insights.

As discussed above, tracking the results of traditional marketing activities is more difficult than monitoring the output of marketing activities done through online channels. To be able to gauge the success of offline marketing activities, here are a few ideas.

Landing pages – When advertising via traditional channels (via print or television), include a different URL for each channel that potential customers can visit. You can then track which of the channels are the most effective by the amount of page views generated on each unique URL.

Discount codes – Discount codes are an effective way to track which offline marketing activities and channels are most effective. To monitor which of these bring in the most revenue, designate a different code for each marketing activity and track through your POS the performance of each.

Hashtags – Including hashtags in your offline marketing campaign gives your audience a chance to use them across social media platforms. You can then monitor on social media where and how the hashtags are used.

Survey – A short survey, whether conducted online or offline, asking customers where they first discovered the brand will give you an idea of which marketing activity or channel has the widest market reach.

Key performance indicators or goals should be set prior to launching a marketing campaign. For each of the marketing activities in the campaign, goals should be set. Corresponding metrics should also be assigned to each of these goals. The results from the metrics should then be compared against your target goals as well as numbers from previous marketing activities. Over time, the data that you will gather from all of these will paint an accurate picture of where your business stands in the minds of your customers. This will then allow you to make better-informed marketing and business decisions in the future.

Watch out for an upcoming article, which will delve into the meaning of key metrics by channel type.

The post Marketing Metrics which matter most (Part 1) appeared first on Reload Consulting.

There is an abundance of information available online and through research facilities, to guide your choice of marketing activities. However, the most effective insights will be from your own research, and from the results of your past marketing efforts. So if you haven’t already, it would be suggested to put systems in place to monitor the results of all your marketing activities. What exactly should you monitor? And how do you do this? When engaging in a particular marketing activity, each tactic should have a goal attached to it. For example, a milestone may be: to increase sales, to increase brand awareness, to generate new leads or engagement and to build customer retention. For each of these set goals, there are several metrics that can be used to monitor performance.

Increase in sales – Selling is the ultimate goal of operating a business. The sales performance for both online and offline activities – whether it is increasing, on a plateau or not meeting targets – should be measured. This should be done periodically and measured against previous months, or against sales made on the same period in the previous year/s. Online sales will be easier to measure as e-commerce websites come with a feature to track sales. On the other hand, offline sales might need to be monitored manually.

Increase brand awareness – Brand awareness can spark curiosity among potential customers. This may encourage them to get more information about your business and to be in contact with your customer touch points. For online activities, the metrics to keep an eye on are website traffic, page views, downloads, mentions on social media and referral links. Offline, you can measure phone inquiries, foot traffic and email inquiries.
Generate new leads- Your new marketing efforts should be able to generate new leads, whether the primary goal is brand awareness or an increase in sales. To determine the number of leads generated, you can look into form renewals and completions, email sign-ups, the number of times a blog has been read or shared, as well as subscriptions to your e-newsletter.

Customer Retention – It is more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain them. Thus, your business will benefit from having loyal customers. To be able to track your customer retention, you can use metrics such as renewal (membership or subscription) rates, re-orders, and re-visits to the website.

Engagement – By getting a sense of how customers perceive your product/s and or service/s, you will have an opportunity to see what is currently working in terms of your marketing efforts, and what needs to be improved or removed. Engagement can be monitored through activities such as blog comments, the number of inbound links, likes, or shares.

As discussed above, tracking the results of traditional marketing activities is more difficult than monitoring the output of marketing activities done through online channels. To be able to gauge the success of offline marketing activities, here are a few ideas:

Landing pages – When advertising the traditional way (via print or television), include a different URL for each page that potential customers can visit. This way, the potential customers can be directed to a unique landing page. You can then track which of the traditional channels are the most effective.

Discount codes – Discount codes are an effective way to track which offline marketing activities and channels are most effective. To monitor which of these bring in the most revenue, designate a different code for each marketing activity.

Hashtags – Including hashtags in your offline marketing campaign gives your audience a chance to use them across social media platforms. You can then get on social media and monitor where and how the hashtags are used.

Survey – A short survey, whether conducted online or offline, asking customers where they first discovered the brand will give you an idea of which marketing activity or channel has the widest market reach.

Key performance indicators or goals should be set prior to launching a marketing campaign. For each of the marketing activities in the campaign, goals should be set. Corresponding metrics should also be assigned to each of these goals. The results from the metrics should then be compared against your target goals, as well as numbers from previous marketing activities. Over time, the data that you will gather from all of these will paint an accurate picture of where your business stands in the minds of your customers. This will then allow you to make better-informed marketing and business decisions.

The post How to Tell if your Marketing Activity is Effective appeared first on Reload Consulting.