Many marketing programs are not cost-effective. The business world is changing quickly, and your company should take a hard look at what still makes sense, given significant technological and competitive shifts.
Here are 28 questions you might consider asking about your marketing…
1. Is it more important to improve our advertising, or our products?
2. When we compete on price, are we showing a lack of faith in the value our products deliver to customers?
3. Are we using needs-based customer segments as a means to allocate marketing resources? Have we created such segments?
4. What knowledge do we have about specific customers that our competitors lack?
5. What are the benefits of having knowledge of our customers that our competitors lack?
6. How do we make it more convenient for our customers to be loyal than disloyal?
7. What could we do to make it more convenient for our customers to be loyal to us?
8. What percentage of our revenues come from delivering customized products or services to customers?
9. How do we use customer information to benefit that customer?
10. How many new ways could we develop to remember information for customers, instead of just about them?
11. When we collect feedback from customers, do we talk in terms of the job/task they were doing or just in terms of their perception of our firm?
12. What percentage of our marketing budget can be quantified by accurate metrics?
13. Are we 100% truthful with customers? (This is important because social networking is making it much easier for customers to “out” firms that mislead their customers.)
14. Marketing tries to make our firm look good. How do we avoid having social media call us out for fudging the truth?
15. Is our outbound marketing declining in effectiveness?
16. Do we offer enough compelling content online and through mobile to attract customers to come to us?
17. Are we designing sensors into our products and services? What percentage of products?
18. Do we encourage customers to provide feedback, and do we allow other customers to see it?
19. Could we take funds from advertising and general marketing and shift them to developing more innovative services and products?
20. Do we have active and effective teams that combine marketing, engineering and design professionals?
21. Do we encourage and respect a diverse range of opinions and skills across our marketing organization?
22. What percentage of our customer touchpoints are smart (interactive) vs. stupid (static)?
23. Do we have a mobile strategy that places a greater emphasis on serving than selling?
24. Are we consistently looking at the edges of our industry to spot disruptive technologies and business models? (Disruption tends to come from the edges of an industry, not from the established companies.)
25. Do we speak at customers or with them?
26. Do we reward customers for feedback?
27. Are we getting increasingly granular in our marketing metrics, to better spot opportunities?
28. Do we reward employees for serving customers, regardless of their division or job function?