How to Improve Your Marketing Operations

November 26 2019 - You cannot rely on your current customer base to continue providing you with a healthy turnover of profit. Eventually, people will lose interest in your services, they’ll find products cheaper elsewhere, or they’ll simply just fancy a change. You can’t begrudge customers leaving you and seeking pastures new — if anything, you should be grateful that they brought you their custom in the first place.

What you must do, however, is find a way to replace the customers that you lose. One way to do that is to attract new ones to your business by improving and subsequently optimizing your marketing operations.

To find out how that can be achieved, be sure to read on.

Train your marketing staff

The first action that you should consider taking in this instance is training your current marketing employees. They are the ones that are faced with bettering your marketing endeavors day in, day out, so they need to be equipped with all the tools they need to optimize their workflow.

There are many different routes to take when it comes to training your marketing workforce, each of which varying in cost, effort, and time. You could, for instance, send your employees on a week-long training course so that they can get up to speed with all the latest advertising trends. A week is not enough to truly transform your marketing department, though, so you might want to consider going one step further… sending your employees on a Master of Marketing course and funding them through college. It might seem like a big ask, but taking this option will see your staff members become experts in strategizing, planning, directing, implementing, and improving advertising campaigns. What’s more, making this kind of investment in your workforce will showcase the fact that you believe in them and that you want them to become better marketers; appreciation on their part will then no doubt see your staff members work even harder for you going forward.

Always work with your audience in mind

Your marketing campaigns serve one purpose: attracting your target audience to your business. You can’t expect to attract this niche group of consumers, though, if you don’t tailor your advertising around their wants, needs, tastes, and likes. For this reason, you need to work with your audience in mind at all times, and they should be at the forefront of your thinking whenever you make a big marketing decision.

One of the biggest tasks that you and your marketing department face in this instance is personal taste. Everybody involved with your advertising, you included, will have some sort of bias when it comes to the campaigns that you propose to run. You will like certain aspects of it, whereas, say, your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) won’t. For the good of your campaigns and the audience that you hope are going to saturate it, a happy medium has to be found and personal biases need to be put aside. It’s about what your customers want, not what you want.

Know and understand your customers

Of course, in order to be able to work with your audience in mind, you first need to garner a deeper knowledge and understanding of them. To ensure this is the case, you must be prepared to perform a bit of market research. If conducting correctly, this research will see you unearth all kinds of useful information, including customer demographics and trends.

In order to conduct market research in as thorough a manner as possible, you should:

• Define your buyer persona (what is their age, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, location, job title, income?)
• Determine what it is you want/need to know about your customers, and identify the portion of your buyer persona that will allow you to garner the results you need
• Pick and choose what aspects of your customers you wish to hone in on (you can’t research everything, unfortunately)
• Aim to survey at least 10 participants from your buyer persona, and try to ensure that these 10 people are as different to one another as possible (make sure they are different ages, for example)
• Check out what your competition is doing to engage their customers and try to draw inspiration from them

Make full use of social media

By making proper use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, you can cultivate thought leadership, you can improve your SEO rankings, and you can communicate directly with your customers. Quite simply, if you’re not already doing so, you need to be using social media in your bid to build and bolster your brand identity.

When you do decide that social media is the way forward in the marketing industry, you should also resolve to make use of social media management tools. When used correctly, these tools will allow you to take full control of your handles and platforms, they will provide you with much clearer insight into what content is and what content isn’t engaging your customers, and it will allow you to automate and schedule your advertising campaigns.

If you don’t embrace social media or technology in general to better your marketing operations, you’re in danger of falling behind your competing pack. If you choose the right tech tools and don’t just go chasing the latest ones to take the Internet by storm, technology can be a great enabler in the field of marketing. It’s just down to you to pinpoint what pieces of tech are worth your investment, and which are better left on the shelf.

The world of business can be a fickle one at times — face it, your existing customer base would have no qualms in leaving you high and dry should they ever find a better deal elsewhere. For this reason, you must always have new customers coming in to make up for those that leave you. To attract new customers to your business, you can rest on your laurels when it comes to your marketing operations — you have to constantly look for ways to improve and better the way you advertise your business. Take the above advice, and you’ll be sure to do just that.

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