11 ways to ensure your marketing delivers value when budgets are tight
Renewable energy marketing and communication professionals are under increasing pressure to deliver more results with tighter budgets. Laying the right foundation is a key step to take if you are to optimise the results of your communication programs and processes. Here are 11 ways to help you move in the right direction.
Get your primary marketing materials right
The marketing basics are your brand identity and your primary communication tools such as your website, brochures or case studies. Ask yourself: What is the point of spending your budget on promotional programs such as advertising, if you end up losing the leads you have generated because your website doesn’t live up to your customers’ needs and expectations? Make sure you take care of your marketing material properly in the three areas of design, content and user experience. If your logo is dated, you should seriously envisage a rebrand.
Start Measuring Marketing ROI
We can’t put a greater emphasis on this. Although it is generally accepted that measuring marketing ROI is a very strenuous task (and in some cases perhaps impossible), you must focus on this however imperfect the results will be. This will help you to identify what is worth doing or not, as well as to demonstrate the value of your marketing spend, which will eventually lead up to your getting the budget that is really required in the following budget years.
Focus on creativity and imagination
Money will buy you quantity, but remember that great ideas cost you nothing other than time, and deliver huge value. Make sure you and your team operate in an environment that is favourable to creativity. Leverage your team’s creative capital or hire an agency that will provide fresh ideas and perspectives.
Challenge every activity
All too often, we do things simply because we have always done it before. It is wrong, wrong, wrong. Ask yourself: Can I live without doing this? What will be the real impact on the business if I don’t do this activity? This exercise can also consequently free up time and budget to engage in new, higher value marketing activities.
Demand to see the business plan
We have seen it before: the top management requires to see your marketing strategy without giving you access to the business plan (sometimes there simply isn’t one!). This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. A marketing strategy must always be entirely based on the business development objectives and strategy developed in the business plan. So insist on getting access to the business plan.
Integration matters
All your activities should have at least some level of integration. This is a good way to weed out useless activities: if you can’t integrate an activity to the broader plan, consider investing your time and money on something else that makes more sense.
Establish a correct, need-based customer segmentation
List each of your markets in terms of business priorities. Describe the value that is required by each segment, and how your organisation creates this value. Write up segment specific propositions to start having more targeted and relevant communications with your various audiences.
Your major customers are kings
In case of limited resources, make sure you have done everything that was necessary to maintain and increase your number one customer segment, before you start investing time and money into nurturing the lower layers of your customer base. Similarly, don’t engage in too broad a marketing campaign: remember that reaching out to people that will never be your customers is worse than useless; It’s a drain on your resources.
Get your senior management on board
Make sure that your top management understands what you are doing, what value you create for the business, and how you need their active support in order to implement the marketing strategy effectively. You should be the main advocate of the establishment of a customer driven ethos within your organisation. Your top management should ultimately ensure that the marketing and communication function is reconciled with all the other departments of the company.
Leverage your company’s intellectual capital
To ensure your marketing content delivers the maximum value, you will need your colleagues to play along. So learn how to get content from your company’s experts. For instance, make sure your technical staff understands the value of marketing for the business. They will then take the time to share their expert knowledge with you so you can communicate with your audience about your product and services in a more meaningful way. Don’t expect them to do the work for you: most of the time, it is easier for a marketer to learn about technical subjects than for a technical guy to learn how to communicate effectively!
Get your sales guys on board
There are two main reasons for that: firstly, you cannot measure the return on investment of your marketing and communications activities without their active involvement. Sales reports, lead conversion analysis and customer feed-back are what you need, and the sales team holds the keys to that knowledge. Secondly, they may have their own vision on how to deliver on the business plan, so you have to make sure that marketing strategies and sales strategies are well in tune.