1. Call a truce with sales--Take the head of sales out to lunch to find out the challenges they face in selling. What are their pain points (not the customer's)? What do they need from you to make their jobs easier? What are they hearing from potential customers, and does it differ from what you hear? Share your knowledge as well, but make a point of asking questions.
2. Try something brand new--Most marketers have pet ideas they'd love to try, if only they had the time. Make time for one of those ideas. Maybe it's a customer advisory panel, a new premium on a direct response campaign, or your first email promotion. If management won't sign off on it, suggest running a small test. When results exceed your expectations, you can roll it out in a big way.
3. Collect email addresses at every touch point--You may not have or need an email newsletter, but you should still be collecting email addresses from every customer. At some point, you're sure to want to include email as a marketing avenue. If you foresee a specific use for the emails (newsletter, email coupons), ask for permission to send that specific kind of marketing.
4. Meet with customers face-to-face--Talking with real customers is often more telling than the most in-depth survey or a focus group performed by a third party. Make it a point to sit down with customers at trade shows, or get a client contact name from someone in sales and just call them up for a chat. (This is more than useful market research. You can also use customer anecdotes to strengthen your position internally.)
5. Share market research results consistently--Where do your research results live? In a drawer? In your head? Not good. Come up with a consistent solution for sharing them. Launch an internal newsletter, house results in a central database, leave them on tables in the lunchroom, find other ways to constantly remind people that you have tools to help them make decisions.
Marketing For Business Leaders: 3 Steps To Increase Marketing Effectiveness
In the quest to increase results from marketing, companies tend to focus on tactics. They worry about creating a better brochure, upgrading the website, or running a new ad campaign. However, often the greatest leaps in marketing effectiveness come from focusing on how it all ties together. Here are three steps for business leaders to improve their marketing effectiveness by fine-tuning their marketing processes.
1. Know what you need.
Marketing s main job is to feed the sales force with nice, warm leads. Step one towards better marketing is to understand how much and what kind of ..
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Financial Services Marketing Insights: A Marketing Compass
What we now call marketing began long before the name was coined. In the mid-1800s, traveling salesmen dressed snake oil and other tonics in fancy packaging and extolled their virtues to a gullible public. New marketing applications soon proliferated in the belief that marketing could make many new things possible in virtually any business situation. For more than a century, implementation, experience and ultimately strategy have helped marketing evolve from crude beginnings into todays sophisticated practices.
Consumer product firms have been the pioneers in the marketing field and ..
Paul Nastu is President of PJ Writing Group LLC, which provides marketing communication services to clients that range from Fortune 50 companies to startups in search of a unique identity, voice, and message.
