Evaluate Your Marketing

If your business is currently struggling (or even if it’s doing well), review the definition of marketing and the basic marketing process to determine where you might improve your efficiency and effectiveness.

Ask yourself questions such as…

• Have you developed products and services that meet a real need of your actual customers?
• Have you surveyed your customers (or just talked to them) to discover how they feel about your products and what you can improve?
• Can you make further improvements to your products to get them to the point where your customers feel they cannot live without them?
• Have you priced your products low enough to make them affordable to your target customers?
• And have you priced them high enough that you’re making sufficient profit on each sale to make it worthwhile?
• Do you have special pricing strategies (coupons, discounts, sales, etc.) in place to encourage people to buy your products consistently and repeatedly?
• Have you made your products easily accessible to customers?
• Are they available through multiple channels (e.g. in your store, on your website, through third-party distributors)?
• Are they always in stock when your customers want to buy them?
• Do you have a promotional plan in place?
• Are you promoting consistently and continually?
• Are you testing your promotion to find what works best?
• Are you reinforcing successful promotion and dropping/tweaking ineffective promotion?
• Are you investing enough into promotion to get your sales to the level you need in order to be viable?

These and other questions will help you evaluate your strengths as well as areas where you can improve. From there, you can build a strategic plan for taking your marketing to the next level.