If you are a small business person or entrepreneur thinking of marketing your business, where do you start? If you try the DIY approach, you will need to navigate a steep learning curve, and there is a good chance that will drain your time and budget. If you decide to hire a marketing agency or professional, you’ll need to find an honest and competent one right off the bat, in an industry rife with both enthusiastic beginners, and scam artists.
I’ve put together this list of questions that any competent marketer will ask before marketing your business. If they take your money without asking these questions, there may be a problem. Also, when you have answers to the questions, you will be in a better position to market your business yourself.
Marketing Questions
1. Define your target audience? For multiple audiences, define each.
Researching your target audience is the first step to marketing your product or service. Are there enough people in your market looking for your product or service? How will you appeal to those people and convince them you are the best choice? What marketing channels does this audience typically engage with? How do they find the products and services they use? What is their typical decision making process?
Knowing your target audience and their behaviors intimately will offer invaluable information on how to reach them, and convert them to customers.
2. What geographic area(s) do you serve?
This question is an extension of knowing your audience, but is an important factor in targeting your marketing budget. It can help you from overspending in geographic areas that are unlikely to result in significant sales and better targeting that budget to more profitable areas. Target geography is also a key setting in all paid advertising platforms, so it is good to have that information at hand before setting up your campaigns. Geographic performance is also a metric that will help you optimize your marketing campaign performance on an ongoing basis.
3. What is the lifetime value of a customer to your business?
Knowing and monitoring the customer lifetime value (CLV) for your business is essential in calculating marketing budget, as well as budget for customer retention and customer service programs. Basically CLV is calculated by multiplying the customers average purchase value by the number of purchases they make over their customer lifespan (not their actual lifespan).
4. What is the value of a typical sale to your business and how much of that is profit?
This information is also needed to determine marketing budget, but in a more direct way. It will help you determine the proper target cost per acquisition (Target CPA) for your campaigns. This is especially important for pay per click campaigns that use machine learning algorithms to set bids in real time. With this information in hand you are much more likely to run profitable campaigns right off the bat. You will also know how much money to feed back into your marketing program so you can grow your business. Ideally your marketing budget should be unlimited given a positive return on investment (ROI). Having a marketing budget set in stone means you are limiting your business’ potential for growth.
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Sales Funnel Questions
Now that you have the potential client’s attention, how will your business handle it? Your experienced competitors – the big names in your market will surely have a system in place to efficiently handle leads. Because you are bidding against them on the marketing playing field, if they are more efficient in converting those leads to dollars, they will be able to outspend you for the same leads. Competing will be difficult if not impossible.
5. If you get a lead, how will you know which marketing channel it came from?
It can be a matter of complex digital tracking, or as simple as just asking. Either way, if you don’t know where your leads come from, it is impossible to tell which of your marketing channels are writing your pay check, and which are a waste of money.
6. How will you get that information back to your marketer or marketing team so they can make adjustments to optimize your campaigns?
If someone else is running your day to day marketing tasks, they need to know which leads are gold, and which are garbage. Machine learning algorithms will try to get you as many leads as they can, and if a certain keyword or other variable is resulting in more leads, it will target more budget there, taking budget away from those that are lower performing. Not discriminating low quality leads from high value leads and feeding that back into the system is a sure-fire way to cripple your marketing campaign from the start.
7. When you have a successful outcome, what is your process for requesting an online review?
Online reviews are such an important factor in modern marketing that they can’t be overemphasized. Positive reviews rarely happen on their own. You need to have an automatic process in place to request reviews from every successful sale or conversion. Building up an inventory of five star reviews also protects you from that crank or competitor that leaves a nasty one star review. Be advised that unless a review blatantly violates the platform’s guidelines, it is unlikely to be taken down.
In addition to requesting reviews, you should always respond to both positive and negative reviews. When you respond to negative reviews, you have the opportunity to give your side of the story, and offer context. Often your response can flip the overall feel of the interaction to a positive one. Just be sure your response is never angry or nasty.
Doing some research and really digging into the details about your business and market can go a long way in ensuring success. Hopefully these questions will start you on that path.