Primary Times - the definitive what’s on and where to go family guide of activities and events for children of primary school age. Things to do with your kids during the school holidays including arts and craft activities, music and theatre for children, parties, competitions, days out, and family attractions along with term time drama schools, dance classes, after school clubs and sports activities. Things to do at a place near you!
Marketing Tips | October
Tip 10 - Review your marketing strategy
Why it’s so important to review your marketing strategy regularly
Your marketing plan is a living, breathing document. If you wrote it 12 months ago and it's been sitting in a folder minding its own business, the chances are that something in your market will have changed. This could be changing customer behaviour, competitor activity, regulatory changes, or even changes within your organisation. If you’re not regularly reviewing your marketing and the markets you operate in, you could be at risk of falling behind your competitors.
Marketing planning is a fluid process. Your marketing plan serves as a blueprint for how you will get from A to B, but you need to review your strategy to ensure it’s still fit for purpose. After all, the marketing strategy you set 12 months ago, may not be the right one to get you where you need to be in the next 12 months.
How do you review your marketing strategy?
- Review marketing performance
If your marketing objectives are SMART and your marketing activity is directly related to your marketing goals, you will measure the performance of your marketing. This could be monitoring the number of enquiries your adverts are generating, the hits to your website and the number of customers acquired and the cost of acquisition.
The best way to monitor this is to update a spreadsheet or database weekly with crucial marketing metrics, and review this on a monthly and quarterly basis so you can see any trends in performance. If something is working particularly well, identify what and why this is and apply the findings to your other marketing activity. If something is not working, take remedial action, or change tack. But use the data to make informed decisions, rather than relying on gut feel.
But remember, reviewing marketing strategy is different from evaluating tactical campaigns. When you’re reviewing your marketing strategy, you are looking beyond your own organisation. You need to consider your competitors, customers and the markets in which you operate.
- Update your SWOT
Your marketing plan should contain a detailed SWOT analysis. The strengths and weaknesses of your organisation are listed alongside any opportunities and threats that exist outside of the organisation.
Your marketing plan will focus on shoring up weaknesses, using strengths to capitalise on opportunities and protecting your business against threats. But if there have been significant changes outside of your organisation, for example, a competitor launching a successful marketing campaign has meant you have lost market share, you may need to change focus to deal with the threat.
If you don’t review your SWOT, you risk carrying on with the current marketing plan and wasting valuable time and budget that could be diverted into protecting your business from the threat of an aggressive competitor.
- Scan your market
While you have some control over what happens within your organisation, you have can't control what happens outside of it. That’s why it’s so important to keep a close eye on what’s happening in externally (in the macroenvironment as it’s called). The PESTEL tool is a useful one to help you with this. PESTEL is an acronym for each of the elements of the external environment that you need to monitor. This is how you use it:
Political – what political changes are on the horizon, there’s the obvious one of Brexit currently but what does that mean for your market and your company? What might a change of government mean?
Economic – what’s happening in the economy that could impact your business? Will your customers have more, or less, disposable income in the coming months?
Social – what social changes could impact your business? Are more parents working full-time because of the cost of housing and living in general? Does this mean that grandparents are doing more of the childcare, and if so, ought they to be part of your target market?
Technological – technology advances so quickly and can be hard to track, but you need to understand what technological advances will impact your business. Are there any opportunities? Or threats you need to prepare for?
Environmental – what environmental changes are you aware of that could impact your business?
Legal – are there any regulatory or legal changes that you need to consider, we’ve had GDPR but are you ready for the e-privacy regulation?
- Talk to your customers
What do you your customers believe you offer? Has this changed in the last 12 months? Your brand is not what you want it to be or think it is; it’s what your customers perceive it to be. If you believe you offer your customers an educational and fun experience, you need to be certain that your customers believe this brand promise.
Let’s take the example of Lego, their brand promise is all about ‘the joy of building and the pride of creation’. If you go to the Lego section of a toy store, you can see that Lego completely understand their target audience. I went into the Thomas Moore store in Exeter recently, the Lego section was amazing, there were several giant Lego creations and a whole host of Lego toys on offer - my children spent ages in that part of the store. Why? Because they love creating something out of the bricks.
You may not be a brand the size of Lego, but you still need to think the same way. How much of a gap is there between your brand promise and your customer’s experience of your brand? You need to conduct research with your customers to find this out and if you discover there is a gap, then you need to work on improving the customer experience to close the gap. For more on how to do this, we’ve written a useful article on ‘Listening to your customers’ (link to tip 2)
- Keep a close eye on your competitors
You need to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Are they launching new services or products that could challenge yours? Are they investing heavily in advertising? What’s their positioning and marketing messaging? Has this changed at all? Monitoring your competitors enables you to respond to any challenges for market share. You can also ensure your marketing strategy takes advantage of your competitor’s weaknesses. And don’t forget to monitor any new entrants to your market.
Pulling it all together
The good news is that reviewing your marketing strategy doesn’t have to be a difficult process. By documenting your marketing performance on a weekly basis, you will start to see trends when you review on a quarterly basis. If you have written a SWOT, a competitor analysis, a PESTEL and have a method for capturing customer feedback, you can schedule an activity to update and review this on a quarterly or six-monthly basis.
There’s no point reviewing your strategy if you’re not going to do anything with the data. If something isn’t working, change it.