The function of marketing has seen tremendous changes during the last decade.
It is gaining center stage in most organizations, and the marketing department is under constant pressure to perform.
As an entrepreneur, it is critical to stay up-to-date with the operations of your team as this is the determinant of your business returns.
Here are 12 questions to ask your marketing department with regards to their goals, performance, and organization.
What Are the Marketing Department Objectives?
Working without clear goals can lead to the adoption of various strategies that are not working.
A marketing department needs to have a well laid-out plan that outlines its short- and long-term goals.
Do they want to increase or retain customers, improve brand visibility, convert visitors on the website, or gain a larger audience?
These questions will help determine the best techniques, tools, and technologies that will advance their objectives.
What is Your Brand Strategy?
The company brand is more than the logo, slogan, or name—it is the customer experience users have with the organization, product, or service.
Your marketing department should have a strategy to improve brand awareness, visibility, and loyalty among clients and prospects.
It is easy to learn more about established brands such as Facebook and Apple because they’ve taken great care to work a marketing plan.
You want your customers to have a similar awareness about your brand if you want to increase customer loyalty.
How Are You Developing the Product?
There’s a need to develop a differentiated product that meets your customers’ requirements and preferences.
Your marketing department should be coming up with ways to develop a product that gains traction among consumers—and sells.
This process requires an understanding of the cost targets and the market.
Ensure the marketing department has a clear vision of this and are employing the relevant resources to achieve it.
Who Are You Targeting?
Sales and marketing are interrelated as marketing usually leads to more sales.
Your team should be targeting potential customers if they want to realize better returns.
If the audience they are marketing to is different from the target customers, they may lose future clients.
Ensure their marketing and sales goals marry for optimal performance of their strategies.
How Are You Leveraging Big Data?
Every marketing department should be taking advantage of big data and analytics to identify their target demographic, learn consumer behavior, trends, and preferences, and stay ahead of the competition.
Seek to find out whether your team is using big data and which tools they employ to generate analytics reports and data.
What Are Your Customer Retention Strategies?
A high customer turnover rate is not good for any business.
Unfortunately, most marketers focus on acquiring new customers rather than retaining the existing ones.
Enquire about the retention strategies—they could be email marketing, follow-up calls, texts, or meetings.
Ensure the business is striving to build close relationships with the loyal ones who have been around.
Do You Offer Compelling Content to Attract Customers?
When it comes to digital marketing, creating content is one of the best ways to draw the attention of prospects.
Enquire about the team’s strategy in creating relevant, unique, and captivating content for their audience.
One of the questions to ask your marketing department is whether they have a way to determine the reception of their posts and updates?
If not, they should employ automated tools that will help create content that has better reception.
How Are You Tracking Results?
As most businesses embrace digital marketing, it is critical to test campaigns and determine whether they are working.
Your team should be employing tools to track return-on-investment and conversions from social media and the website.
By monitoring and testing these results, the team can determine which strategies are working and which ones need to be tweaked or eliminated.
Failure to do this will lead to waste of time and resources on unfruitful campaigns.
What is Your Success Metric?
Various success metrics are available for marketers, and the common one is revenue.
Others include qualified leads and engagements, email, and newsletter sign-ups.
These metrics help determine the viability of their campaigns and strategies.
If you have an e-commerce store, you can use revenue and leads as the metrics.
Ask how they currently measure success and how the parameters interact with the overall objectives.
Which Areas is the Competition Falling Short?
You need to stay ahead of your competitors by identifying what they are lacking and providing it to your customers.
You can achieve this by acquiring information from the consumers.
The marketing department should be using analytics and social listening tools to learn what customers in the industry are saying.
This data gives insight into their preferences and unmet needs.
The organization can then capitalize on these areas to provide where the competition is lacking.
How Many Referrals Are You Getting?
When customers are satisfied with your product or services, they refer the business to their friends and social circles.
You can weigh the success of your campaigns by calculating the percentage of sales received from referral customers.
More references mean your clients are happy.
High sales with no referrals are an indication there is no unity in delivering on the expectations, and the team should work on that.
Which Areas Can You Double the Effort?
When it comes to marketing, it is vital to employ various strategies as some may fail to work.
The efficient ones should receive more attention and resources as compared to the rest.
Your marketing department should be able to identify the highly productive strategies.
Those areas are where you’ll inject more funds and time.
These are the questions to ask your marketing department if you want to determine how well your organization is performing.
They will help you gain insight into areas such as digital marketing, brand awareness, product development, and customer acquisition and retention.
Ensure the team works on the addressed areas to achieve successful marketing campaigns.
