Asking the Right Marketing Questions

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. Your strategies are inevitably going to vary based on your products, brand identity, target demographic, and more. However, even a firm understanding of each of these aspects is just the first step. What complicates the campaign conceptualisation process is that you can’t simply expect to experiment with different materials and find success—a haphazard promotional approach can confuse your customers and actually push them away.

While third-party marketing consultants can solve some of these problems with their insight, asking the right questions of your marketing prior to forming a short or long-term partnership can greatly enhance the quality of the service that you receive. That’s why today’s article is going to focus on the five defining questions that you must ask of your marketing campaigns prior to rollout.

#1: What Problems Are Your Customers Facing, and How Do You Intend to Solve Them?

It can occasionally happen, but few consumers among your target demographics are willing to spend money with few expectations of the product in question—a vast majority will only be willing to part with their hard-earned cash once you’ve established a worthwhile value proposition. That means you must position your products in a way that solves the problems that they are likely to be facing on a day-to-day basis. Are you going to revolutionise their commute? Help them stay better organised? Or perhaps you’re going to give them something to occupy their spare time and minimise boredom. Regardless, understanding the gaps in the lives of your consumers and the role that your product will play in filling them ensures that you both have a market, and are capable of garnering the attention that your product deserves.

#2: What Differentiates You From the Competition?

Unless your product is truly innovative, there is most likely at least one direct competitor vying for a similar base of customers. Finding success, then, means conducting objective comparisons between your offerings in order to find the angle that will carry your campaigns. Playing up the areas in which you have an edge lends a hook to your marketing, making it specific enough to be highly memorable among your consumers. In simpler terms, you want to ask yourself the following question—“when customers recommend my products to their friends, what do I want them to say?” If you have a simple, straightforward answer to this question that can be easily transmitted to others, then you’re on the right track.

#3: How Do You Measure Success?

Effectively achieving goals requires that they’re targeted and measurable, enabling your business to effectively align its strategies to these key performance indicators. It’s up to you to decide how to measure the success of your campaign strategies. Are you interested in generating leads? Improving your market share? Or simply generating a profit on an exciting new product launch? While you always want to ensure a high ROI and ROAS, remember that some campaigns can be smaller in scope than others, and should be evaluated accordingly. Once you’ve created a set of highly specific—and most important, realistic—key performance indicators that you want to achieve, you can begin conceptualising a road that hits each and every one.

#4: What Terms Do You Want to be Defined by?

While marketing is a holistic endeavour that involves a wide variety of strategies and promotional channels, you’ll undoubtedly be turning to SEO at some point, and for good reason—there is still a massive demographic that discovers new content primarily through search engines. However, choosing which keywords to emphasise requires more than analysing which terms are popular and integrating them into your site or product descriptions. In fact, keywords work both ways. They not only draw in new customers, helping to improve your online visibility but also serve customers by giving them an idea of how your offerings are presented. Emphasising keywords such as “affordable,” can signify cheapness—a negative connotation—even if you didn’t intend it to be read as such. Choose your keywords carefully, and consumers will have a good idea about what to expect from your products before they even click your links.

#5: What’s Your Approach to Continuous Improvement?

Marketing is refinement. While it would be ideal to experience a strong fiscal year and consider it a success, all of your hard work would have been for naught if you can’t repeat those strong performances. That’s where continuous improvement comes in. Once you’ve hit all of your KPIs, you need a way to keep this influx of new customers roped into your suite of products. In other words, you need to convert first-time buyers into lifelong customers. You can accomplish this by emphasising outstanding customer support, a best-in-class warranty or simply a commitment to manufacturing the undisputed best products in your niche. Whatever route you choose to take, make it’s one that will appeal to your customers for the months and years to come.

The correct actions require the up-to-minute insight needed to make informed decisions—getting to this information requires that you ask the right questions. This article has presented you with a few of the ones that are most pertinent for most businesses, but it’s by no means exhaustive. Supplement the questions that we’ve provided with more that are specific to your unique situations in order to obtain the actionable information that you need to conceptualise and rollout highly effective marketing campaigns.