To say that everything feels a little uncertain right now with the current pandemic would be an understatement. Many of our dealers are on high alert. We encourage you to take the time now, before the new year, to assess your marketing strengths and weaknesses to pivot and improve your strategies and target customers harder than ever.
The best place to start is at the beginning to highlight gaps in your marketing to see where there is room for improvement. We use a simple marketing assessment tool called Marketing Strength Metrics that covers 5 areas of marketing that will help you determine very quickly where your biggest gaps are.
5 areas of marketing to assess:
1. Branding
Does your brand (company image) accurately convey the quality of your company? Does it tell the story to your customer of what you’re really all about? Taking a hard look at all areas of your brand from the logo to the messaging gives you an overview to see if your brand identity matches the customer’s perception of you. Getting feedback from customers could also helps to determine how people view your brand image.
2. Culture
Often we forget that company culture ties directly to marketing. If there are a lot of internal disagreements and disunity regarding the direction, vision, or mission, this confusion will be reflected in your marketing. If your employees don’t know the unique “why” of your company it’s a safe bet the customers don’t either. When employees and departments in an organization are aligned with the company’s vision, the marketing plan is on the right path to being successful.
3. MarCom
MarCom, aka marketing communications, is everything from design collateral, advertisements, PR strategy, social media, e-newsletters, or any promotional material. How are your flyers, social media posts, etc looking? Is it fresh, relevant? Ensuring you have enough marketing communications and that it accurately portrays your brand is vital.
4. Sales
Over and over again, we see sales and marketing clash and remain dysfunctional. Sales and marketing strategies should complement and support one another to accomplish the same goal. How well do your employees/departments work together? Marketing should be supplying the support for sales people to use to make sales and give them collateral to help turn cold leads into warm and hot. Sales is the disciplined follow-up engine that makes the ultimate head way using marketing materials. Without this teamwork, it is hard to move a ship cohesively towards success.
5. Customer Service
Usually, the first thing a customer notices about a company is how nice and knowledgeable they are. Nothing sticks out more than rude and ignorant service. Having exceptional customer service should be a key factor in your marketing strategy. This looks like over-delivering, responding timely, and being transparent. Treat your customers as valued individuals by building trust.
Take the test.
Answer the following and rate your organization on a scale of 0–10 with 10 being the best:
- How confident are you in your organization’s brand?
- Is your organization’s culture aligned with the vision?
- Does your MarCom accurately portray your brand?
- Do your sales activities coordinate with your marketing strategies?
- How well do you deliver on customer service?
So, how did you score in these 5 areas? Hopefully, this will give you some insight into where the gaps are in your marketing strategies. Not sure where to start? Contact us at info@orig-dimalantadesigngroup.devsquad.tech to get a free one-hour consultation from marketing expert, Ernie Dimalanta.
Get real-life examples by watching the Marketing Strength Metrics webinar at https://bit.ly/2WO63Mv.