Customer Feedback and Marketing Performance

Customer Service Policy - A policy or code of practice is something that most organisations have in place for when dealing and providing excellent customer service. This is in order to deliver customers with efficient and prompt service when making sales, handling enquiries, and monitoring customer feedback and complaints. These could include an outline of expected standards of service, as well as discretion, courtesy, follow-up and confidentiality processes. 

Consumer service standards are often set in the organisation's vision or mission statement.

When new employees commence employment, they should all undergo an induction training process that could include information and instructions on;

• Appropriate greeting of customers.
• Answering the telephone appropriately.
• Dealing with difficult customers.
• Where to get required and relevant information.
• Who to seek assistance from.
• Personal presentation and dress standards.
• Interpersonal skills.

 

Features That Make Up Customer Service

DIMENSION	DESCRIPTION
Access	Approachability, ease of contact
Responsibility	Willingness to keep customers happy and provide prompt service
Courtesy	Politeness, respect, consideration, friendliness
Reliability	Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
Security	Freedom from danger, risk or doubt (e.g., security of data, protection of health and safety)
Communication	Keeping customers informed, in a language they can understand; listening to customers
Understanding the customers	Making an effort to know customers and their needs
Tangibles	Appearance of physical facilities equipment, personnel and communication
Credibility	Trustworthiness, believability, honesty of service provider
Competence	Possession of the required skills and knowledge to perform the service
Source: Parasumanina A, Zeithamel VA & Berry LL 1994

Essential tips when working with different consumers;

• First impressions are imperative.

• The quality of the service is a direct reflection on the business success.

• Ask lots of questions to give the customer the opportunity to clarify what they need.

This will show the client that their requirements are important and also it may encourage the client to become a loyal repeat customer that can recommend the business to friends and family.

Remembering that it is more expensive to find new customers than it is to retain existing customers. Exceptional customer service means that a business will stand out from its competitors, and satisfied customers will promote the company by word of mouth, which is the most efficient form of promotion.

Examples of how Customer Service Standards could be improved;

STANDARD	ORIGINAL STANDARD	OPTION FOR IMPROVED SERVICE
Customer Convenience	Open five days. Customer reception desk at entrance.	Open seven days. Comfortable reception area which includes: • latest magazines • hot and cold drinks, etc • your car serviced while you wait.
Customer Communication	Answer phone promptly. Consistent greeting. Accessible by phone (fixed and mobile), email, fax, and post.	Answer phone in 3 rings or less. Friendly and professional greeting. Use customers’ names. Free call phone number, email, website contact form, social media.
Product Knowledge	Highly skilled and experienced staff. Work well under pressure. Customers are consulted about work to be done.	Fully trained and accredited staff. Staff training prioritised to ensure being ‘first with the latest’. Customers are advised of latest trends.
Customer satisfaction	Guaranteed customer satisfaction. Manufacturers Warranties are given. Complaints acknowledged.	Survey all customers with each service (e.g. with phone follow-up – were you happy with your service? followed by feedback form via email.) Warranties given for all work with money back guarantee. Telephone support provided.
Quality	Qualified back-up support for excess work. Work to customer’s requirements. Use quality suppliers only.	Quality assurance accredited. Complaints procedure part of quality assurance. Use preferred quality assured suppliers.
System’s Effectiveness	Customer database. Customer records maintained.	Relational customer database used. All customer records relate to database for ease of analysis. Customers’ correspondence programmed, eg billing, advice of next service, etc.
Source: Parasumanina A, Zeithamel VA & Berry LL 1994

 

Understanding these structures gives managers the ability to investigate their own workplaces and identify actions that they could take to improve the customer service in the departments/areas and branches they manage.

In a client-focused organisation, employees are required to listen to the customer for their contribution and feedback in order to determine what they consider to be critical about the products supplied, or the way service is delivered. From this, improvements and changes can be made resulting in the business gaining a more competitive advantage over competitors as customers will be happy to become long-term clients.

Customer reactions and feedback analytics and data can provide us with a lot of information about what our customers and clients think, want and need from our business. Seeking this information straight from the customers is what feedback is all about.  It can provide us with valuable statistics and information that can make available a clear picture of what’s going on with our marketing mix and how to improve targeting opportunities. 

Customer feedback is a great way to get ideas on how to improve your business and assess your marketing mix. When seeking feedback, it’s best to:

• make it as easy as possible for customers to provide their recommendations or ideas for improvement.

• make sure you take the time to action feedback.

• thank customers for taking the time to provide their feedback.

Receiving positive feedback is great. However, it is the negative feedback that has the potential to deliver valuable understanding on where or how your customer service or business processes can be improved. It can also give you an opportunity to address a customer concern or complaint, and turn their experience into a positive one.

For useful advice on negative reviews online refer how to respond to negative reviews.

Receiving feedback from consumers may also benefit your business, by encouraging you to develop a unique product or service that is different from that of your competitors. Taking the time to analyse and action customer suggestions may lead to positive word-of-mouth, increased referrals and new clients, improving your overall sales and profitability.

There are many different methods and processes that you can use to collect customer reactions and feedback every day. It is essential that this is done by using culturally appropriate processes and methods.

Six ways to seek consistent and high-quality customer reactions and feedback are:
1.    Surveys
2.    Feedback boxes
3.    Social media channels
4.    Reach out directly (phone or email)
5.    Focus groups and interviews 
6.    After sales follow-up feedback

It is imperative that once the data is collected, you use the information to decide on what is required to improve over time and identify customer trends in your business. This will assist you and help you meet your business goals.

It is important that you respond and thank your clients that took the time to provide their comments and feedback. Let them know how their feedback was useful and how it helped you to improve your business.

If the implemented changes are from suggestions based on customer feedback, you may seek follow-up feedback from the customers that made the suggestions once changes have been applied and sometimes has passed. This will be an excellent way to check that their expectations have been met, and to ensure you have correctly addressed a customer need or want to improve your business.

Customer Satisfaction

What methods can we use to monitor customer satisfaction?

There are several ways of monitoring information relating to customer perceptions, some are OVERT such as monitoring customer complaints and others COVERT such as observing competition.

There is no single method but a range of techniques from which customer perceptions can be derived.

• Repeat orders - The number of repeat orders (e.g. 75% of orders are from existing customers) is one measure of whether customers are loyal but this is not possible for all organisations, particularly those that deal with consumers that do not capture their names. Another measure is the period over which customers remain loyal (e.g.  20% of our customers have been with us for more than 10 years). A marked change in this ratio could indicate success or pending disaster.

• Competition - Monitoring what the competition is up to is an indicator of your success or failure. Do they follow your lead or are you always trying to catch up? Monitoring the movement of customers to and from your competitors is an indicator of whether your customers are satisfied.

• Referrals - When you win a new customer find out why they chose your organization in preference to others. Find out how they discovered your products and services. It may be from advertising or maybe, your existing customers referred them to you.

• Demand - Monitoring the demand for your products and services relative to the predicted demand is also an indicator of success or failure to satisfy customers. It could also be an indicator of the effectiveness of your sales promotion programme, therefore analysis is needed to establish which it is.

• Effects of product transition - When you launch a new product or service, do you retain your customers or do they take the opportunity to go elsewhere?

• Focus meetings - A personal form of obtaining information on customer satisfaction is to arrange to meet with your customer.  Seek opinions from the people within the customer's organisation such as Marketing, Design, Purchasing, Quality Assurance and Manufacturing etc. Target key product features as well as delivery/availability, price and relationships. This form is probably only suitable where you deal with other organisations (Business to Business).

• Complaints - Look at the overall number of complaints the upward or downward trends and the distribution of complaints by type of customer, location and nature of complaint. Coding conventions could be used to assign complaints to various categories covering the product (or parts thereof) packaging, labelling, advertising, warranty, support etc.

Any complaint no matter how trivial is indicative of a dissatisfied customer. The monitoring methods need to take account of formal complaints submitted by the customer and verbal complaints given in conversation by telephone or meeting. Everyone who comes into contact with customers should have a method of capturing customer feedback and communicating it reliably to a place for analysis.

• Compliments - Compliments are harder to monitor because they can vary from a passing remark during a sales transaction to a formal letter.  Again, all personnel who come into contact with customers should have a non-intrusive method for conveying to the customer that the compliment is appreciated and will be passed on to the staff involved.

• Surveys - There are several types of survey than can be used. There is the impersonal form and the personal form.  The impersonal form relies on responses to questionnaires and seeks to establish customer opinion on a number of topics ranging from specific products and services to general perceptions about the organisation. The questionnaires can be sent to customers via post, included with a shipment or filled in before a customer departs as with hotels and training courses. These questionnaires are somewhat biased because they only gather information on the topics perceived as important to the organisation.

It should be noted that questionnaires by themselves are not an effective means of gathering customer opinion. Customers don't like them and are not likely to take them seriously unless they have a particular issue they want to bring to your attention. It is much better to talk face to face with your customer using an interview check list. Think for a moment how a big customer like Ford and General Motors would react to thousands of questionnaires from their suppliers. They would either set up a special department just to deal with the questionnaires or set a policy that directs staff not to respond to supplier questionnaires. Economics alone will dictate the course of action customers will take.

The personal form of survey is conducted through interview such as a customer service person approaching a customer with a questionnaire while the customer is on the organisation's premises. This may apply to hotels, airports, entertainment venues and large restaurants. With this method there is the opportunity for dialogue and capturing impromptu remarks that hide deep-rooted feelings about the organisation.

Method to monitor how well a customer’s expectations for quality service delivery are being met;

• Conduct periodic surveys of customer satisfaction levels.

• Use group process techniques to involve senior members of the project team in reviewing the findings of such surveys, identifying opportunities for improvement, and updating the project strategies and plans, as appropriate.  As well, solicit input from project team members, who can often be the most help in finding solutions to any problems identified.

• Formally record and manage the action items that result from customer satisfaction surveys and track them through to closure.

Source: https://www.toolbox.com/tech/enterprise-software/blogs/monitoring-customer-satisfaction-060408/

Evaluating marketing performance will guide future marketing initiatives and help a company achieve its goals. Determining what areas of the marketing mix to modify, as well as whether products, services, and ideas meet customer and stakeholder needs, are some of the primary reasons why companies evaluate their marketing performance.

When evaluating marketing performance, companies should;

1. measure marketing outcomes from the consumer's points of view, 

2. include all marketing activities,

3. measure across a continuous time period, and

4. meet statistical and technical criteria required of all measurement systems.

The most popular factors to consider when it comes to marketing performance measurement are:

• Brand Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Customer Acquisition
• Thought Leadership
• Engagement
• Customer Retention/Loyalty
• Website Traffic
• Lead Management/Nurturing
• Sales
• Repeat Clients and/or Website Visitors

 

To accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing activities, KPIs must be integrated within the business and management of the company. To ensure meaningful comparisons among activities, companies should employ a common scale, and measurement error must be quantified so that managers can react to changes in conditions.

Companies employ various methodologies to measure marketing performance and ensure they meet those performance goals.

Marketing Plan

Marketing plans serve as the blueprints for your company's sales strategy. They lay out every detail of what's to come over the next year and may be subject to alteration or evaluation because of changes in the market. Marketing should not be set in motion and left alone, but constantly reviewed, evaluated and adjusted to suit the needs of the company and the wants of the consumer. Understanding how to judge whether your marketing plan is delivering the best possible results can save you time and money and help ensure the success of your business.

Reviewing Sales Numbers

Reading the numbers can be the fastest and most basic way to determine whether your plan is working. For example, if your overall sales for last year from June 1 to September 1 totalled $100,000 and your total sales for this year totalled $150,000, you can deduce that your current marketing plan is having some sort of positive effect. Take into account any rise in prices or expansion of the business, but when all is said and done, in raw numbers, you are selling more than you did a year ago.

Customer Response and Reactions

Customer response in all its varied forms can help you to determine what type of reactions your marketing creates. Surveys online and in person, general customer service feedback and online commentary can all reveal what your customers think of your marketing and which campaigns have the greatest impact. Simple questions like "How did you find out about our seasonal sale?" can reveal which initiatives are reaching the customer and which market segments are making purchases.

Marketing Reach Expansion

If your marketing reach is expanding, the effectiveness of your plan is the probable cause. Marketing that makes its way into new regions either by customer recommendation or natural growth indicates both a successful and popular product or experience and an effective marketing message. The expansion of your marketing budget is another sign that your plan is working well and has gained more support from the company. 

Marketing Partner Response

Your marketing partners will offer feedback about whether your marketing plan is working. Partner feedback reveals the effectiveness of your efforts in relation to associated brands, suppliers and vendors. These outside members of the team might feel the effects of a successful campaign before you do because they are often on the front lines and might have more direct customer interaction.

The same goes for a negative report. If your partners are asking when you will be releasing new marketing efforts, it might be time to revamp the marketing plan.

Outside Salespeople Feedback

Outside salespeople are a great barometer for the measurement of marketing effectiveness. Ask for feedback from your soldiers in the field to determine whether the message you are providing and the ways you are providing it are effective. You are sure to get advice in any case, but if the feedback is overwhelmingly negative or customers are completely unaware of your latest marketing efforts, your plan should be revised to better address existing clients and to suit the needs of your sales team.

Actions of Competitors

The actions of your competitors can often be very telling when it comes to the success or failure of your marketing plan. If competitors rush to copy what you've done or try their best to one-up your initiatives, the plan is working. If your campaigns go largely ignored or there is an immediate negative response, there may be an issue or at least a question about what you've set in motion.

Determining Success Of An Online Campaign

Everything you do in business must have a measurable ROI (Return On Investment)—and this is particularly true when it comes to any and all forms of online or offline marketing. When it comes to online marketing, the written and visual content you place (or pay to have placed) must be tested and measured to ensure it is successful. In most cases, the longevity of a particular method of online marketing changes far more rapidly than methods of marketing in the offline world. If you utilise content marketing for your marketing, the performance measurements below are the best way to determine the success of each campaign—or individual piece of content;

1. Set The Goals For Your Campaign.

2. Website Analytics.

3. Performance of Inbound Links.

4. Social Media Analytics.

5. PageRank.

6. Ask.

7. Referrals.

8. The Bottom-Line Dollar.

9. Overall ROI.

Begin By Setting The Goals For Your Campaign
 
When it comes to marketing, some of your content will be geared towards conversions, for example your landing pages.

In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, other social media or similar places on the web.

While your homepage has dozens of potential distractions (links) the landing page is super focused. Having fewer links on your landing page increases conversions, as there are fewer tantalizing clickables that’ll carry visitors away from the call to action. That’s why expert marketers use a dedicated landing page as the destination of their traffic.

Sure, the homepage looks amazing. It shows off the brand, lets people explore a range of products, and offers additional info about the company and its values. From here, a visitor can go anywhere — apply for a job, read some press releases, review the terms of service, post on the community boards, etc. But they won’t necessarily make a purchase. And that’s the point.

The landing page serves a completely different purpose. Paired with super slick ads that promote a single offer, everything about it works hard to turn these visitors into customers. It’s doing a better job to convert the traffic the brand’s already getting. That’s the power of landing pages!

Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call to action (or CTA, for short). It’s this focus that makes landing pages the best option for increasing the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns and lowering your cost of acquiring a lead or sale. 

For example, a social media post that generates 2,000 “likes” and 300 “shares” is challenging to measure the number of conversions that it generates but you can certainly measure your ROI (Return On Investment) when it comes to customer engagement.

Source: https://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/what-is-a-landing-page/

What is important to keep in mind is that each piece of content needs to have a measurable ROI. That each piece of content needs to be measured by more than one of the factors listed above. As with the social media example provided above, at minimum Engagement, Brand Awareness, and Thought Leadership are achieved.

Now let’s take a closer look at the specific tools you can utilise to gauge your ROI.

Website Analytics

Whether you built your own blog or had your website built, you are sure to have access to your website’s daily, weekly, and monthly analytics. Begin by looking at the overall increase or decrease of traffic then delve into it for a bit more detail. Google Analytics is popular because it is free, and can be used to track traffic to your site and for other useful information. Pay particular attention to;

• What is the increase or decrease in traffic from week to week, month to month, and year to year?
• What days of the week generate the most traffic?
• What time of day is your highest amount of traffic?
• What country do most of your traffic come from?
• How many new and repeat visitors are you gaining?
• How many of your visitors are from mobile devices, and how many are from desktop devices?
• What are your most popular pages?
• What are your least popular pages?
• What is the average time spent per page and/or per session?

The bullet points above will help you to improve your current content and marketing strategy, by identifying what is working well—and where your areas of opportunity are.

Performance of Inbound Links

Your website’s analytics tools will provide you with inbound link information, but you must also ensure that your other content (such as your landing pages) provides similar information. Some analytics tools are so advanced that they can highlight not only where the inbound link came from, but the visitors next several clicks within your website.

Without the ability to determine where your traffic is coming from, you cannot accurately gauge the ROI of your content. If a company you outsource cannot provide this for you then they may not be the best investment of your time or money.

Social Media Analytics

Every social media platform will provide you with some sort of analytics. Since you may not be able to gauge the number of leads, or conversions that you generate from social media, you can certainly measure other factors of your ROI. Pay close attention to;

• Overall weekly traffic.
• Most popular posts.
• How many new friends, followers, or connections you generate.
• How many likes, shares, and comments you generate.

 

PageRank

As the traffic to your website or content begins to increase, so should your page rank. As your page rank continues to improve, so will your organic traffic and sales. Pay particular attention to your overall website page rank, and to that of your individual web pages, blog posts, or outside content.

For example, you could have a blog post or outside content that ranks on page 1 of Google, while your overall website page rank is a 3.

Ask

Modern technology brings with it the ability to participate in cross-platform marketing.

For example, someone could hear a commercial for your business on the radio then call you directly on the phone. Someone could receive a direct mailer, which prompts them to email you. With today’s numerous communication methods, it is essential to ask your clients where they heard about you and to track those statistics in-house.

Referrals

The power of referrals is never to be underestimated particularly when it comes to marketing. To ensure that you are making yourself easy to refer to electronically, ensure that your content is easy to share. This is as simple as providing your phone number, email address, and “click to share” buttons to your online content.

The Bottom-Line Dollar

If your sales are on the rise, you are sure to be doing something right! That being said, if you are taking a wild guess as to what that is then you are in a vulnerable position. By identifying what is working right now, you can continue to improve on your current marketing strategy and to transfer more of your marketing time and energy into testing new methods of marketing.

Overall ROI

Once you have determined the performance marketing measurements for your individual efforts, you want to take a look at your online ROI as a whole. Avinash Kaushik of Google recommends that your traffic to your website or sales page should look something like:

• Search Traffic 40 – 50%
• Referral Traffic 20%
• Direct Traffic 20%
• Online Marketing Campaigns 10%

Even if all of your content and placement is outsourced, the marketing performance measurements above are something that you must keep a close eye on.

Source:  https://www.outbrain.com/blog/9-metrics-for-marketing-performance-measurement/

Marketing Campaign Metrics

The campaign effectiveness metrics you’ll monitor will depend on what type of marketing campaign you’re running and what channels you’ve chosen. This section merely serves as a baseline list to give you an idea of what to watch.

Also, it’s tempting to focus on vanity metrics like generated traffic, click-through rate, and impressions. A bump in these is definitely a good thing, but since they don’t necessarily indicate a bump in revenue, they can’t be the only metrics used to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

The way you track and measure your results will depend on the type of marketing tactics you engage in. For example, online marketing can be tracked using analytics and other Internet-based metrics, while tracking offline marketing methods will require a more manual approach.

In general, the more standardised your system for tracking, the more relevant your results will be … and the more successful you will become at tailoring your marketing activities to focus on the areas where you will have the most success.

Here are some metrics to watch per marketing channel.

Email Metrics

• Click-through rate

• Bounce rate

• Conversion rate

Social Media (Paid) Metrics

• Click-through rate

• Conversion rate

• Cost per click

• Cost per-conversion

Social Media (Organic) Metrics

• Passive engagements (likes and shares)

• Active engagements (comments)

• Follows

• Click-through rate

Lead Magnet/Content Offer Metrics

• Opt-in rate

• Cost per opt-in

• Follow-up email open rate

• Opt-in conversion rate

Display Ads/Paid Media Metrics

• Cost per thousand impressions

• Click-through rate

• Conversion rate

• Cost per conversion

Direct Mail Metrics

• Response rate

• Cost per conversion

• Average revenue per conversion

Content/Search Engine (SEO) Metrics

• Click-through rate

• Bounce rate

• Time on page

• Page scroll depth

• Conversion rate

This may seem like a lot of metrics (depending on your campaign), but keeping an eye on these numbers can help you assess your campaign accurately and better understand how to improve.

New technologies can aid business development by making it easier to gather consumer data to improve sales and thus improve performance. Look at some of these examples of new technologies that could be utilised in the customer satisfaction and business and marketing - performance evaluation and improvement spheres;

1. Customer satisfaction survey apps - For example, with CommBox customer satisfaction app you can easily collect customer feedback and leverage the data to grow your business. - Source:  www.commbox.io/why-customer-feedback-is-important-plus-20-ways-to-get-it/

2. Real time data - Companies using their machine data to spot issues and get alerted to possible incidents. The data in Splunk can be used as a system of engagement, to improve customer experience. - Source: www.splunk.com/en_us/blog/customers/cust_exp_machine_data_2.html

 

The marketing sector is volatile, and businesses are constantly on the lookout for the next big thing that will push them ahead of their competition. Source: www.richardvanhooijdonk.com/blog/en/top-technologies-transforming-marketing-right-now

The 'Near Future' In Consumer Engagement;

1. Chat-bot technology - consumer assistants that know you. Promoters predict that Artificial intelligence can make marketing more human. 

2. With FaceMedia's visitor tracking and analysis platform, you can monitor and assess most of your in-store visitors without any interaction.

When evaluating and analysing how to improve your business performance, it is important to consider all influences, including the performance of your marketing activities, advertising campaigns and the performance of your employees.

To improve business performance;

Source: https://www.kimbleapps.com/2016/08/how-to-improve-business-performance/

Performance gap analysis is a way of determining where gaps may exist with an overall business review, marketing or individual staff. A properly implemented performance gap analysis also provides a starting point to develop a corrective plan of action or to set new targets.

Performance gap analysis determines what characteristics are lacking in the performance of a particular marketing activity, advertising program or of the company in comparison with its competitors.

In all instances, actual performance is measured in comparison with standards established by benchmarks for acceptable performance for the business. An alternative type of performance gap analysis may determine what additional skills or training may be needed to bring individual employees or the entire company, up to an acceptable standard when particular aspects of the jobs are changed. This type of performance gap analysis frequently occurs when new technologies or policies and procedures are introduced into a workplace.

One of the first tasks to be looked at when analysing a performance gap is creating a performance map describing the marketing strategies of a particular advertising plan. This performance plan provides a blueprint against which to compare the performance of all marketing activities. 

The analysis needs to be based upon measurable data, not your perceptions or ideas of what is happening. Some of the information that should be looked at when creating a performance map may include;

• break-even point.

• cost of goods/services sold.

• gross profit/net profit.

• desired actual/notional salary for owners/managers.

• desired return on investment.

• sales turnover/gross fees or income.

An evaluation of the performance map with the performance of your marketing activities can reveal the cause of gaps in the performance of average or in association with high-performing workers. A different performance map would apply to each job role within your company.

Performance gap analysis can also help your business enhance its competitive standing in its market when compared with other companies providing similar goods and services. In this instance, the performance of your business is compared with a set of industry-established benchmarks, or with the stated mission of your business. These benchmarks can refer to companies that have acquired significant market share, accomplished excellent profit levels or which have received high regard from their customers. A particular set of benchmarks would apply to each division or department within your company.

Depending on the findings and results of the performance gap analysis, your plan of action may involve changing and reviewing the marketing and advertising activities, additional training for staff, acquiring new equipment or making adjustments in the design and logistics of your office or manufacturing plant. You may also decide to replace one or more members of your staff, or to reorganise the management structure of your company. Completing a follow-up performance gap analysis after the changes have been carried out and applied, you can determine whether the insufficiencies and shortcomings evident in the first evaluation have been alleviated.

For more information refer to gap analysis tools.

When looking at improving your business marketing performance, there are some questions that require answers. 

• Does your business have the correct marketing capacity, technology and strategy to accomplish its performance goals? 

• Is your outlook for growth aligned with your potential? 

• Are there flaws or weaknesses in your marketing and business cores?

• Are you taking full advantage of the return on your marketing investments? 

• Do you have the right agency associates that fill internal marketing team gaps, and add expertise and skills in critical growth areas?

• Are your resources aligned with priority marketing goals? For example, if “generate leads” is a high-priority goal, do you have the right talent, technology and strategy to achieve it?

• What opportunities are available for small business that don't have the same resources of their larger competitors? 

• What can large enterprises do to stay on top, when nimble organisations develop more up-to-date marketing teams, more quickly adapt to marketing technology advancements, and build more intelligent and efficient marketing strategies?

These questions and answers will provide you with a base and further understanding of the importance and requirements to improving your business marketing performance.

There are steps and tips that should be followed and implemented to drive improvement in marketing performance.

• Gain insight from multiple stakeholders - When looking at conducting a marketing assessment, involve key personnel (e.g. executives, marketing and sales leaders) to help you create a clear, well-rounded view of where your organisation stands, and what work needs to be done to increase your potential for success.

• Fill the gaps - during the assessment process, you’re looking for differences in perception and performance—areas where your organisational goals are unlikely to be met by your current infrastructure, assets, or processes. Identify weaknesses in your talent, technology, and strategy, and concentrate your short-term efforts on improving those areas. 

• Commit to core strength - Every organisation should be focused on building assets that can be leveraged to accelerate success, including brand awareness, website traffic, social reach and influence, “owned” databases, persona-based content, industry relationships, partnerships, and goodwill. If the core is weak, then you’ll need to invest resources in building the foundation, adapt campaign strategies, adjust goals and timelines, and properly align ROI expectations.

• Figure out the metrics that matter - What are the 5-10 most important marketing metrics for your business? These numbers should be tied directly to business goals, and all marketing activities must be designed around achieving them.

• Set goal values - Once you know your primary KPIs, assign monthly, quarterly and annual goal values. Also, every marketing campaign should have a primary goal value associated with it. If you can't measure it, don't do it.

• Build a marketing scorecard - Dashboards for measuring marketing effectiveness are simple to build once you know your kpis and goals values, and are becoming increasingly efficient to maintain. While there are technology solutions that offer robust reporting and visualisations, for many businesses, a straightforward excel document or google drive spreadsheet will suffice.

• Define and segment audiences and buyer personas - We have entered an era of contextual marketing and personalised customer experiences. in order to capture consumers' hearts, minds, and wallets, you have to target every campaign and communication as much as possible. It starts with well-defined audience segments and personas.

• Break through internal barriers - The obstacles to evolved, performance-driven marketing are many (e.g. legacy systems, conservative cultures and leadership, traditional-minded sales teams), but the modern marketer wins internal battles with data. Use marketing software analytics to turn data into intelligence, and intelligence into action. 

• Integrate at all costs - Breakdown marketing technology and strategy silos in order to maximize efficiencies and ROI. 

• Find professionals with "a player" potential - Modern prototype marketers are a rare breed. Develop recruiting and training programs designed to attract and nurture top talent.

• Become a performance-driven marketing organisation - Build and evolve your team and technologies to fit your strategy and goals.

• Take a full-funnel approach to marketing strategy - If you think of marketing like a funnel, there are four sections—brand, leads, sales, and loyalty. At the top, companies look to build a brand, attracting website visitors, blog subscribers, and social followers—mainly creating their reach. from there, use content, such as blog posts, ebooks and webinars, to move audiences through the funnel and turn qualified visitors into leads. Once lead contact information has been gathered, leverage email marketing and other activities to provide as much value, and as personalized of an experience, as possible. The goal at this stage is to convert qualified leads into sales. finally, at the bottom of the funnel, conduct campaigns to increase customer loyalty, driving more sales, more referrals, and more profits.

• Balance builders and drivers - Builders are foundational and recurring campaigns, such as blogging and social engagement, designed to create and expand assets. Builder campaign goal values (e.g. visitors, subscribers, social reach) are commonly set by quarter or by year. Drivers are campaigns that capitalize on existing assets to generate short-term returns (e.g. leads, sales) and are often conducted over 1-3 month periods.

• Move your marketing forward - Stop making, and accepting, excuses. Starting the driving change.

• Be remarkable - The new marketing imperative is to create more value, for more people, more often, so when it’s time for consumers to choose a product, service or company, they choose yours.

 

 

Growth Opportunities

 

The possible areas for growth or marketing opportunities for a company may include reaching new markets, identification and establishment of strategic relations, adoption of new distribution channels, making products available in new locations and price modification.  When these marketing opportunities are captured and adopted by the company, the company becomes more profitable.

Reaching new market is about selling the company’s products and services to a new geographic area or new market segment.  It is also about selling to a different customer size like selling to other companies rather than just two individual end users.  It can also be about selling to different individuals within current customers like negotiating with Safety Director rather than the purchasing officer.  Entering into a new market also requires understanding the entire market size, its growth rates and the competitive forces within that market.  

Adoption of a new distribution channel means finding new ways of making products and services available to the customers.  The four common types of distribution channels are direct selling, selling through intermediaries, dual distribution and reverse channels.  Direct selling is when product producers or service providers directly sell their products and services to their customers or end users.  An intermediary, on the other hand, is referred to as the go-between or a third party that offers intermediation services between the buyer and the seller.  A dual distribution is where more than one channel of distribution is used for the products and services to reach its target market. Reverse distribution is where consumers return products to the producers and examples of this include recycling and product recalls.  

Price modification of products and services can also present marketing opportunities. Setting the price of products or services should always consider how customers perceive their value. Such value is based on the products’ or services’ quality, quantity, accessibility and performance.

Marketing in general,  revolves around the concept of 4Ps which are the product, price, promotion and place (Services Marketing tends to be 7Ps). This is called the marketing mix which ensures that the right product is available at the right place. 

All marketing efforts are based on the company’s objectives and targets and evaluating marketing performance is crucial in measuring the success of the business.  Marketing efforts as broken down into its 4 components of product, price, promotion and place can be evaluated by assessing these 4 components against the marketing objectives that are directly aligned with the company’s mission, vision, strategies and objectives.  

In the assessment of marketing performance, it is important to identify critical success factors as these are valid indicators of success or failure of specific marketing actions and efforts.  Critical success factors in this instance would be the specific areas of the 4Ps that are vital to the success of all the marketing efforts.  

Upon evaluation of the 4Ps, areas of improvement can also be identified.  Corrective actions can be designed and implemented when these weaknesses or areas of improvement surface. The business plan will require to reflect these implementations and corrective actions.

Volumes, Pricing, And Product Mix

A business that sells products of different margin, price and cost, the mix of what and how much you sell, can affect results of sales and profit.

Product is the combination of all the features, advantages, and benefits that you offer to your target market. It may include individual characteristics such as quality, packaging, after sales support, customer services, etc. In order to ensure that your clients are gaining the full benefits of your product, you can consider some of the following questions.

• What is the essential benefit your product offers? 

• What does the actual product include? 

• What non-tangible benefits can you offer?

The most important method of improving gross margin dollars is to increase the unit volume of products sold. For companies with a small market share, volume-based growth is the obvious way to grow revenue. But a fundamental insight is that when comparing profitability quarter to quarter, volume does not have any impact on gross margin percentage. The result of the volume is purely to increase margin dollars. 

Separating out volume impact can help companies identify if their efforts to increase market share have been effective or come at the expense of profitability. In some cases, increasing volumes at the cost of price may allow businesses to increase profitability when Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) can decline at a faster rate than the discounts. Price, on the other hand, is a significant contributor to margin %. 

Improvement in margin influence from price may be indicative of supplier pricing power or lack of customer bargaining power. A satisfactory improvement in price value may also point toward an opportunity area for further price increases and indication that money was being left on the table. Price increases may also be taking place due to an increased customer enthusiasm to pay. This understanding is valuable because it could provide some indicators on price elasticity in a particular market in order to drive future pricing movements. Pairing this information with competitive market intelligence, it can provide insight on whether the pricing or volume driven growth approach is lined up with your overall market strategy. 

Pinpointing the margin influences of product mix changes due to individual product groups can help focus efforts to improve sales on particular higher margin products. Often deteriorating product mix is the trickiest challenge for businesses to identify simply because changes in volume may be consuming the product mix change. If left unchecked, deteriorating product mix can wipe off margin improvements from cost discounts or channel expansion. 

A positive attitude and understanding of product mix can determine the particular product(s) decreasing margins. This, in turn, can help you concentrate on whether the root cause of the change in product mix is market or customer was driven or sales incentive driven. Once your company has understood the product drivers, you can focus on short-term strategies to improve margin quality like promotions and sales incentives. You could also accelerate the end of the sale of lower margin products that have a higher margin replacement. 

On the other hand, you can implement targeted price increases or hold price steady on products sold to existing customers. This analysis can also help focus efforts to improve margins by refreshing lower margin, high run products with higher margin replacements.