Rate Your Marketing Activities – How do They Stack Up?

It’s halfway through the year and a great time to take stock of your marketing activities. You have a chance to look at what’s working, what isn’t working, and what needs to be in the plan for next year.

As always, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that marketing activities need to be tied to a marketing strategy to be successful.  In other words, you need to have a solid idea of who you are, who your audience is, what services/products you offer, and what differentiates you amongst your competitors – a road map if you will.

Once you have a strategy in place, then you can begin the process from developing a plan, executing the activities and measuring their success.

By taking this quiz, it will highlight areas you are doing well in and others that might need a bit of work.   When you see the areas you need help with, consult a marketing professional to help guide you to achieving your marketing goals.

Take a few minutes and rate where your marketing tactics are today on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 indicating peak performance.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Our marketing materials don’t accurately tell our story.								Our marketing materials tell our corporate story effectively and engage prospects quickly.
We are not clearly differentiated from our competition. Our prospects don’t know how we are different.								Our unique selling proposition clearly differentiates us from the competition.
Our target audience is not clearly identified. We don’t know who our most profitable clients are.								We have a laser focus on our ideal and most profitable customers and what types of products, services and information they want.
We do not have a functional and effective marketing system in place.								We use a highly functional marketing system that generates significant results.
Our marketing activities are reactive and ad hoc.								Our marketing activities are strategic and aligned with our business goals.
We are not using video, social media, or online in our marketing.								We utilize a variety of marketing activities that include video, social networking, and online to generate new business.
We can’t predict our sales or forecast our revenues accurately.								Our sales revenue can be accurately forecasted which improves our cash flow predictions.
The marketing activities that used to build our business aren’t working anymore.								We are consistently layering our marketing activities in order to strengthen the relationships we have with clients.
We have no tools or systems for tracking results.								We have effective tools and systems in place to track results.
We are not reaching our sales goals.								We are reaching our sales goals consistently.

If you checked off a lot of 1s to 5s, then it means some of your activities are not achieving the ROI you need to be successful and it might be time to rethink and review your marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy is the document that helps to “put your company name” into the minds of your clients; your activities all need to be aligned to your strategy to generate leads and increase your sales.

Let me know how you fared. Did you have any surprises?  Did you find this exercise helpful?