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Take stock of your marketing activity

Ideally, every business should take the time to review its marketing activity every six months at least; you could probably argue that it would be wise to do it even more frequently than this. You should have a good idea of what you have spent on marketing for a given period and how it compares to your sales volume and overall value of sales.

How you benefit

When you are able to link each successful conversion to the marketing activities which helped to secure it, you then have a better understanding of your total cost for each sale. You should also then gain a clearer picture of what marketing activities are most successful in helping you to achieve your targets. If your cost of conversion does not compare favourably with the value of your sales, you may want to reconsider your strategies.

This not only allows you to identify your most successful activities, it also highlights activities that have not proven worthwhile - enabling you to reallocate your resources to your more profitable strategies. You can then take the time to reflect, evaluate and predict ways to duplicate that success with new products, services or markets.

Further considerations

Below are a few questions to consider:

Have your services, markets or customers changed significantly? What might be the cause? Can you respond to these changes and create a competitive advantage?

Do you have enough information at hand to reliably predict changes in your market? Can you implement the proper control and measurement procedures to gather and interpret the necessary information?

Is your marketing mix effective for you now? Do you confidently what results are produced when you alter particular elements of your mix?

Are you achieving an acceptable level of return on your marketing spend? Can you identify which activities produce the most profitable results?

Do your employees have the necessary skills to help you grow your business or do you need to invest in training and mentoring?

Asking probing questions will enable you to put your business under the microscope and may throw up new opportunities for you to exploit. In addition, a good brainstorming session can do wonders for breathing new life into your business and team members.