To maximise return on investment you need to understand how your customers and prospects prefer to receive information, what is the most effective communication channel(s), who makes the decisions and who are the strong influencers. Discover what barriers they perceive when doing business.
Do you know how your organisation, its product / service offering and service levels are perceived by your customers and prospects as we all buy on perception?
Research can take the form of:
No doubt some of you can add to this ever expanding list of opportunities to gather market intelligence about your customers, prospects and competitors.
What is the point, well …. A planned approach to gathering market intelligence will mean that you are better informed and can be more confident in how to allocate your marketing spend and / or have a stronger case when trying to secure your marketing budget. You will be able to adapt to market conditions, be proactive rather than reactive and establish what impacts on your customers business, improve your ROI and improve client retention. You will be better placed to meet customer demands.
In todays multi channel environment there is no excuse for not gathering information about your clients, their preferences, buying habits and processes. Even if you do not have a sophisticated CRM system to store the information you can record and share it with others in your organisation using a simple spreadsheet. But how many of you do this on a regular basis? How many businesses bury their head in the sand and assume that because there’s no complaints then everything must be ok?
All or some of the above can help you get the best from your customers and ensure that your marketing spend is focused on the channels that will maximise your ROI and achieve your overall objectives.
Before embarking upon research think about:
Remember
If nothing else, use your business development team and others in your organisation who have direct contact with the customer. Listen to them, what are they talking to the customer about? Are you missing a trick by not asking the right questions?
At the other end of the spectrum is Google analytics. This is free; you can see who is visiting your website, their location, how long they are on the site, what they are looking at, frequency of visits, peaks and troughs, what stimulates visits – using these statistics could save you £1000’s of wasted spend on misdirected marketing activity.
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www.reformcreative.co.uk | 0161 236 0054
An award-winning designer who has had work published in the most coveted D&AD annual. Educated to degree level with a BA (hons) in Design. Paul has 20 years in the design industry. Paul brings with…
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