Disciplined, fact-based marketing
Peter Drucker once said: “The purpose of any business is to find and keep customers.”
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So how can your marketing be made more effective?
The first thing to do is to move the decision making process up a notch by
replacing intuition with reason and logic.
Your gut is not smarter than your head
Too many business owners believe that they have an innate ability to make
faultless snap decisions. They continue to maintain that illusion even as their
businesses crash and burn.
A 2006 survey found that 66 percent of them felt confident making marketing
decisions based on their own sense of what would get a response from a
customer.
Sixty-two percent made decisions based on their own judgment and experience.
Four out of ten thought intuition was better than data, and a third were
skeptical of fact-based decision making.
It is true that the snap judgments and intuitions of an expert tend to be more
accurate because experts have had more practice. However, the average person’s snap judgments are just as likely to be wrong.
Similarly, focus groups have recently come into question. Executives are
beginning to realize that the results aren’t necessarily a reliable measure of the market, because of the difficulties in
getting a true sample of the customer base to become participants.
Give your marketing a performance review
The first step in developing a fact-based marketing program is to evaluate the
current situation. Let’s take a look at how to determine how well a marketing program is doing at the
present time.
Every marketing strategy should begin by developing an understanding of what is
taking place in the marketplace today. The key to that is to conduct a
marketing performance audit.
The performance audit identifies operational strengths and weaknesses and
recommends changes to your marketing plan.
Here are the eight items that a marketing performance audit should assess:
1. Key changes taking place in your business: economic, demographic,
competitive, marketing, technological, or environmental. They should be
measured for their impact during the past year. This measure should include an
evaluation of marketing surprises, such as unanticipated competitive moves.
2. Decisions in your marketing mix should only be made after evaluating all
alternatives. Look at targeting, positioning, and pricing.
3. The research that was used to support key marketing decisions. Was a full-scale
demographic segmentation and targeting study done within the past three years?
4. Internally market the marketing program to your employees. It’s important that employees be made aware of and a part of a marketing program
before it is implemented.
5. Initiate plans to monitor and manage marketing programs.
6. Track the current performance of your business in terms of success in the
marketplace such as customer awareness of new or featured services and overall
customer satisfaction.
7. Did the marketing plan achieve its financial and non-financial goals?
8. Which part of the plan failed to meet the stated objectives and specific
recommendations for improving next year’s performance?
It is also vital to understand customer loyalty — and to measure it. What is the likelihood that a customer will switch to or
from another cleaner? How strongly do existing customers feel about remaining
your customer?
The major factor influencing customer loyalty is satisfaction. The Golomb Group
has found that when customer satisfaction is high but purchasing intent is low,
there is room for a company to improve sales significantly.
Lastly, measure your current share of the market, along with the market’s trend. If the market is growing by seven percent a year and your sales are
growing by only five percent, there is obvious room for improvement.
At the end of this comprehensive marketing performance review, you will have a
much clearer picture of your marketing efforts and will understand the
strengths and limitations of your entire marketing plan.
