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When hiring a marketing professional, or evaluating an existing employee, it is important to evaluate their understanding of the following key marketing concepts: the marketing plan, branding, and ROI.
Seems obvious they should know these things right? Unfortunately, our experience shows that many marketing professionals only partially understand these fundamentals. In fact, the most common issue is that many do not define the concepts correctly, resulting in a marketing effort that never realizes its full potential (at best) or quite simply falls flat.
Asking each candidate the following three questions, and carefully evaluating the answers they give, will ensure a more strategic, and therefore more successful, approach to your marketing activities:
What is a MARKETING PLAN? Define It. A good marketing plan must be more than a list of marketing activities you expect to execute. It must include company goals, industry analysis, your company identity/positioning, product and service messaging, target market definition, competitive analysis, and your sales model and/or process. Only after these foundational elements have been fully explored and determined can a marketing plan then, AND ONLY THEN, include a marketing mix and budget that has been thoughtfully created based on the above elements. Also, to be effective and efficient, your marketing plan must be agreed-upon and supported by all levels of the company at all times and revisited regularly to measure status and address necessary changes. (Also Read: Revisiting your Marketing Strategy)
What is BRANDING? Why do it? Your company’s brand is its promise, an expectation of your products and services in the marketplace that helps build awareness, loyalty, and equity. This means that branding is bigger than just your logo. It is the consistent delivery on the promise of your brand to your customers. Achieving consistency isn’t easy, but it is the combination of being consistent and being relevant that develops a strong brand, and consequently more sales, for your organization. (Also Read: Defining Your Brand Strategy Can Be Efficient and Fun!)
How do you measure Marketing ROI? Investment in and measurement of the success of any marketing program always comes back to "what's the return." There are techniques you can use to measure this during and after execution of your marketing plan. To do so effectively, you need to create an ROI Calculator that will provide an ESTIMATE of how many leads your program should generate, how many customers you should convert, and therefore your projected return on investment. Then as you execute the plan, you must track actual return on those things that can be tracked and measured. This requires some metrics or conversion benchmarks be determined to plug into the ROI formula: The ROI formula you should use is the NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS x EXPECTED RESPONSE RATE = LEADS GENERATED PER YEAR x LEAD-TO-PROPOSAL % = NUMBER OF PROPOSALS x CLOSE RATE = NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS x ANNUAL CUSTOMER VALUE = REVENUE - TOTAL MARKETING EXPENSE = ROI. (Also Read: Calculating your Marketing Plan ROI!)
Over the years, we have found that a difference in how these key concepts are defined by marketing staff and managers alike will result in both a dissatisfying employer-employee relationship and an ultimately unsuccessful marketing effort. Turn that around by making sure you and/or your marketing staff truly understand the importance of correctly defining and managing these concepts.
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The Sales and Marketing Toolkits BUNDLED contains:
- Over 60 sales and marketing templates (DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDFs)
- Loads of "how-to" articles and examples
- 8 Training sessions (MP3 audio files) for your computer or iPod
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