Too often marketing is viewed as a discipline dominated by “creative” types. I disagree and want to show you why.
Marketing is the discipline that controls the most important moment in your organization: the very intersection of a customer – or potential customer – with your product, service or brand. This is a vital moment of truth.
While not every business operates for-profit, all want more of something: reputation, influence, resources. More customers, revenue, brand champions, more engagement with its customers.
If something rang a bell for you in that list it might be because those are seminal business problems (not necessarily creative problems) and marketing is a business discipline that helps solve them all.
1. What is my value proposition and does anyone care?
Value proposition is the intersection of what your audiences want and need, what your competition is doing and what you do uniquely, the better or best to fulfill those customer wants and needs.
Halmyre's Method For Developing A Value Proposition©
Marketing is the profession that governs that equation, and marketers work in the domains of the classic “4 P’s” to do it: your product (or services), your pricing, your place (how customers access your products and services) and your promotions. That is the marketing toolkit and its very strategic, financially placed and methodical.
Hear how a focus on value proposition helped one client unify and clarify so many questions:
2. Are my customers engaged with me?
The real strategic nut to crack here is that most organizations haven’t defined what it means for their customers to “engage” with their company in the first place, so it’s often impossible to answer the question.
And, when the question isn’t clear, in marketing, the go-to tool for measuring engagement is the email open rate, which is a terrible measure of engagement. Email open rates inform you of how well your emails are performing, not how robust a deeper concept of “engagement” performs for your organization.
Marketers answer the engagement question using passive and active research, data analytics and analysis, frequently with tools readily available to all organizations.
3. Is my marketing working?
Marketing is too often perceived as a cost centre: it demands human and financial resources to do it well and to develop it with market trends.
If you can’t say definitively that it is working, then assume it’s not and that you are also wasting your time and money. Why? Because if you can’t answer this question with “yes,” that says you treat it as a cost centre.
Marketing should actually be treated like an ROI-centre – a driver of your growth – rather than just a consumer of your resources.
Marketers help organizations to strategically set their Key Success Factors (KSF) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure their marketing. Boards and executives should govern this process and more junior staff should support the strategies and plans.
To spark your thinking on this question, and to think more about how KSFs and KPIs can support your marketing strategy and drive ROI and results for your organization, click to this page to download our whitepaper Marketing Data Intelligence: Getting the Insights You Need to Make an Impact.
Marketing professionals are a vital strategic partner for any organization’s growth. They are the experts at knowing how to reach, influence and persuade your audiences to move your strategy forward by governing key audience interactions with your product or service. Marketing professionals can provide discipline, measurement and ROI-based plans that boards and executives can understand.
Consider your organization’s capacity for this type of strategic marketing thinking, and perhaps start with an audit of your strengths and weaknesses to help you chart a path forward.
And you can learn more about how Halmyre can spark growth in the role of marketing strategy partners for our clients by clicking here.