A recent study on the effectiveness of marketing activities was conducted by Suzanne Lowe, founder of Expertise Marketing LLC (USA).
Suzanne Lowe, author of “Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete To Win,” found that most CMOs underestimate the importance of strategic marketing goals. They often fail to focus on marketing goals that can help them increase their individual performance or help their business stay ahead of the competition.
From the above research, Suzanne Lowe concluded that, to increase the effectiveness of marketing activities and bring businesses above the market, CMOs must adhere to the following 5 strategic goals (arranged in order of importance) and evaluate the implementation of these goals at least once a year.
1. Identify current and future customers of most strategic importance.Many CMOs only know that AI is the most strategically important customer in the past, but not the most strategically important customer in the present and future. Identifying the most potential customers should be a fundamental first goal for CMOs, because other goals will be built on top of it.
Lowe's research found that only 19% of CMOs surveyed said this goal was most important. Perhaps, Lowe explains, this is because these CMOs think they already know that the current and future customers most important to the long-term growth of their business are AI.
2. Attract the most important and strategic current and future customers.CMOs surveyed rated this objective as the second most important of the five objectives presented. This objective is also the traditional core task of CMOs and includes many very important tasks such as creating differentiation, positioning and building brands, organizing events to create added value for customers, direct mail marketing advertising, etc.
3. Retain current and future customers of most strategic importance.CMOs surveyed consider this goal to be the most important. Most CMOs accomplish this goal by focusing on activities that increase engagement and communication between the business and its customers. CMOs often work with business development directors to maintain relationships with their most important customers.
4. Increase business revenue from your most strategically important existing customers.Surprisingly, most CMOs surveyed underestimated the importance of this goal. This suggests that CMOs often do little to collaborate with colleagues in other departments within the company to achieve one of the fundamental principles of competition: increasing revenue from the best customers. To achieve this principle, CMOs must collaborate with other colleagues to strengthen relationships with loyal customers, making them use the company's products the most instead of sharing this with the company's competitors.
5. Increase the value of the business in the eyes of everyone (including investors, customers, partners, employees…).
There is a significant difference in the perception of the importance of this goal among CMOs surveyed. About 40% said it was the least important task, while more than 22% thought it was the most important goal.
This reflects the fact that businesses often perceive that the main task of marketing is to carry out communication activities and “polish the image” rather than aiming for tangible, customer-related and measurable results.
But if a business has not yet identified its most important strategic customers (and has not yet implemented the goals of attracting customers from competitors, retaining customers and increasing revenue), efforts to polish the image of the business or brand may be ineffective because it is aimed at the wrong customers.
DNSGCT
