Making your brand noticeable is a big challenge in a world bursting with so many different brands, choices, offers, and price options. Cutting through the noise requires a marketer with creativity. But more important still, a marketer who can both create powerful brands and then measure their impact on people once they are launched in the market; and then kill it off quickly if it has no impact. To be this type of marketer, you must first challenge yourself. What are the expected outcomes from the brands you create? How effective is your marketing content before, during and after brands are launched? What are the advantages of marketing and planning consistently? How can you consistently measure your marketing efforts? These are just some of the questions marketers should be asking. 

 

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It would also be fair to say that senior executive management only occasionally checks on brand and marketing performance ⁠— say if an expensive brand launch has worked and the pay off etc. Unfortunately, tracking and monitoring marketing campaigns and brand equity with customers is an exception rather than the norm and something rarely followed up by the C-suite.

 

From what we can see from our consulting work, often in business, the focus of the C-suite is on driving sales to make a budget. How customers perceive new brands is very much on the back burner at budget time.  

 

So we ask, what ways can your business articulate your marketing strategy and performance consistently without making it a burden for teams and executives?

 

In this article, we discuss the expectations and objectives of marketing teams in a world with so many choices. We also delve into the advantages of marketing planning and standards. At Taylor Wells advisory, we argue that a marketer who focuses on metrics that drive outcomes and results can quickly identify when methods and brands need a refresh. We believe metrics, tracking and clear decision-making are crucial and transformative to your business’s growth, and sustainability.

 

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The Advantages of Marketing and Planning: Defining Common Marketing Metrics and Standards

 

What is marketing planning?

 

Marketing planning establishes the duties and responsibilities of marketing team members in order to meet organisational objectives. Furthermore, it reinforces the best and most cost-effective allotment of marketing resources. Hence, it offers advanced guidelines for marketing models. This entails planning policies, programmes, and budgets ahead of time for executing the various marketing activities and functions in order to achieve marketing objectives.

 

American Marketing Association describes marketing planning as the process of establishing marketing objectives and deciding and timetabling the steps necessary to accomplish those objectives. The first management function to be performed in the management process is planning. It encompasses any venture’s survival, growth, and prosperity in a competitive and ever-changing environment.

 

What are the advantages of marketing planning and standards?

 

1. A marketing plan and strategy enable the accurate definition of the target market.

 

A plan allows you to understand your prospective consumers, their demands, issues, and values, as well as how your product or service satisfies or solves their problems. Following that, you can determine how to engage them, such as the messaging, channels, and resources you will employ.

 

2. A marketing plan and strategy enable a proper understanding of the competition.

 

In order to create a marketing plan, you must first define how your brand, products, and services will be positioned in relation to your market competitors. Specifically ask, what distinguishes your offering from your competitors in the eyes of your target customers?

 

Then you can differentiate your company apart from its competition. In this manner, you’ll see how you might improve or augment your product to be more competitive with your competitors’ services.

 

3. A marketing plan and strategy prevent inefficient resource allocation.

 

When you have a well-defined marketing strategy, you may spend on promotional activities with a high potential to generate a positive ROI. These include advertising initiatives that correspond to the purchasing habits of your target market.

 

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After the advantages of marketing planning, let us now go through the most critical aspects of planning marketing and strategy. When creating your own roadmap, the initial step is to identify the following factors:

 

  • Your desired outcomes
  • Why they are important
  • How do you measure your marketing metrics?
  • What you can do to further influence the outcomes
  • The people and teams responsible for changing the results
  • How do you know you’ve achieved your desired outcomes?
  • How often will you monitor your performance as a team?

 

After careful consideration of the above points, you may move on to researching marketing dashboards. What is the purpose of this?

 

Marketing Dashboards to Define Common Marketing Metrics and Standards

 

Advantages of Marketing Planning

 

A marketing dashboard monitors your customer’s brand awareness, their preference over other brands, and how likely are they to consider it next time. However, only less than 10% of companies measure their investments in marketing capabilities and research. While almost 80% focus on tracking sales and revenue performance. 

 

Consider Govee, a tech company that specialises in AI and smart home devices, which was able to increase its online traffic to 350%, orders were up by 310%, and sales climbed up to 340% in just one year once its marketing team measured their strategies.

 

More importantly, when you have set up all the necessary metrics, you need to identify which marketing strategies aren’t being measured. This encourages collaboration from your cross-functioning teams from the sales department and pricing professionals. 

 

It also enables automation and visualisation for chief marketing officers to dig deeper into the strategies that work and how efficient they are. These can be done using tables, bar charts, and line charts to understand the fluctuations, trends, and patterns. What impact will these have on your company’s marketing and strategies?

 

 

The Advantages of Common Marketing Metrics and Planning Ahead

 

Now we come to the meat of our topic. Here are the areas of your business that will gain the most from forethought and the use of marketing metrics:

 

1. Type of Information

 

Which information is most important in your business? This allows you to gain a comprehensive view of your strategies and their results as well as the influence it brings to your brand. The content of your marketing strategies and their relevance varies from one business to another. How can you best use this to your advantage?

 

2. Timeline

 

Here are some things marketers should think of when it comes to timelines: How far into the period are you aiming? Is it a multi-period model or a periodical that consistently measures customer loyalty? Do your metrics track monthly, quarterly, or annual marketing performance? Your timeframe must be specific, realistic, and attainable for both short-term and long-term periods.

 

3. Historical Data

 

Make use of historical information. Use it to track the performance and efficiency of each marketing strategy and promotional campaign in different timelines. For instance, you can investigate, click-through rates and site visits. 

 

Our advice is for your database to be managed by cross-functioning teams from the sales and pricing departments. In this way, you establish accountability and the ability to optimise your plans, execution, managing trends and patterns, and strategies.

 

4. Tools

 

We refer to the tools and new processes that you invest in your marketing efforts that measure your leads, conversion, and customer retention. These marketing tools include:

 

  • Online marketing on websites and social media
  • Search engine optimisation which increases your visibility
  • Content creation
  • Event marketing
  • Video marketing
  • Print ads
  • Email marketing
  • Marketing automation

 

Let’s use Amazon DSP as an illustration to get a better picture. Their strategy, for instance, is offering advertisers ad placements that reach customers on and off the Amazon platform. This, in general, allows businesses to plan, optimise, and execute their strategies including performance reports at no cost. 

 

Similarly, Amazon Attribution monitors an organisation’s non-Amazon marketing channels. Tools like these track the total number of conversions, conversion rate per channel, reach and engagement, costs per sale, and ROI. Apart from these, the recruitment tools and procedures you use make just as much difference for the marketing talent that you hire.

 

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Website Performance as a Tool: Advantages of Common Marketing Metrics and Planning

 

Let’s take a look at website performance as a tool. Website performance includes your new users and website bounces. Similarly, website bounces refer to visitors opening a page from a single request and exiting without any other activity, engagement, or interaction. They usually range from 35% for quality content pages to 80% for clickbait pages.

 

In other words, to compute website bounce rate: single-page visits / total page visits = website bounce rate. Apart from this, you should measure the average time spent on page visits to accurately get better information to fuel your decision-making.

 

Similarly, tracking your follower count and page likes on social media is another way of measuring your engagement which you can capitalise on using your marketing campaigns. You then need an analysis of your database and your pricing and sales teams working together.

 

LinkedIn, for instance, categorises its followers and connections into two.  One for businesses and another group for individual accounts. On the flip side, there are business pages that have a considerable amount of followers but are not generating interactions and post-engagement high-priced activities unable to sustain a level of interest from the audience.

 

5. Sales and Customer Satisfaction

 

Chief marketing officers often capitalise on the premise of sales and customer satisfaction to maximise revenue growth. Doing this can also help you measure your relationship with your customers as well as the impact of revenue growth (also known as a net promoter score or NPS.) How?

 

A standard NPS survey can be done to identify your customer’s pain points, solutions stack when it comes to technology, the features that they rate highly, and the value that you offer to them. This can be done via websites or e-mails where your probe further into what customers truly think and feel.

 

To calculate NPS, you need to categorise the survey participants. A question like “How likely are you going to recommend our product/services?” can differentiate customer churn and loyalty. Those who answer with a 6 or lower rating are known as detractors. Those who answer with 9 or 10 are promoters.

 

Then you can begin by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. A good NPS score often starts at 50% and above, while 70% and above is considered excellent or world-class. Yet no company has realistically achieved a score of 100.

 

E-commerce giant Amazon has an NPS score of 54% for instance. Paypal, on the other hand, has an NPS score of 63%. While Google is at 53%, Netflix recently scored 64%, and Apple totalled 49%.

 

Then there are the passive customers who are neither promoters nor “damages” to your brand. Their overall answers range from 7 or 8. However, they are also possibly going to become promoters soon enough. And because of this, it’s your job to segregate them and find out what you can do to convert them into promoters or loyal customers much as you would improve your relationship with the detractors.

 

6. Financial Bottomline

 

What difference do marketing metrics make on your income statement and by how much? How do your marketing strategies impact your sales revenue and balance sheet, for instance? This also quantifies the ROI, ROAS (return on ad spend) and the impact of what marketing research brings to your organisation as an entity. 

 

To measure your ROAS, you need to compare your total spending with the revenue you generated from those ad spending. In other words, revenue / costs x 100 = ROAS. 

 

Our findings at Taylor Wells show that with the right set-up and pricing team in place, incremental earnings gains can begin to occur in less than 12 weeks. After 6 months, the team can capture at least 1.0-2.25% more margin using better price management processes. After 9-12 months, businesses are very often generating between 3-7% additional margin each year as they identify more complex and previously unrealised opportunities, efficiencies, and risks.

 

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Bottomline

 

Marketing metrics allow you to visualise and evaluate continuous data using operational, strategic, and analytical dashboards that explore which strategies work best.

 

This also helps you to identify desired outcomes and why they matter so you can test, evaluate, and tweak your strategies. Then you can reexamine your business objectives, analyse current performance, and then set short-term and long-term performance indicators. Reevaluating these with the senior management, pricing, and sales teams encourages everyone to work on the same objectives, goals, and mission.

 

For a comprehensive view and marketing research on integrating a high-performing capability team in your company,

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Are you a business in need of help aligning your pricing strategy, people and operations to deliver an immediate impact on profit?

If so, please call (+61) 2 9000 1115.

You can also email us at team@taylorwells.com.au if you have any further questions.

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Advantages of Marketing Planning