Naughty or Nice – Did you meet your marketing goals for 2010?

Come December, we all will look back on the year to see if we reached our goals. Focusing this state-of-mind on your company’s marketing program will help you compare your marketing goals to the marketing reality.

Blow the dust off of your 2010 Marketing Plan. Hopefully, December isn’t the only time you’ve evaluated your marketing tactics this year. For many, this will be the first time the plan you spent weeks developing sees the light of day. Don’t let this misstep discourage you from fully evaluating your marketing from 2010 for 2011. Go through the plan line by line to see what dropped by the wayside and what was executed.

Define Success. Were you looking to add 20 new clients or grow revenue by 10%? Without knowing what you were aiming for you, you won’t be able to determine if you got there. If you crafted a solid marketing plan, that information should be laid out for you. If the goals weren’t clearly set, this isn’t an excuse to stop the review process. Putting together metrics after the fact isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

Determine the ROI. Once you’ve pulled together a list of what was executed in 2010, planned or otherwise, you can now calculate the return on your marketing investment. A good approach is to start with the big picture and determine the total ROI for marketing for the year and then break it down by project. Seeing where the ROI is the highest will help you prioritize marketing initiatives for next year.

Be Honest About the Results. You might be disappointed to know that the direct mail campaign your team labored over for months didn’t result in enough new clients, but it was the less exciting SEO project that saw results. While it might be tempting to gloss over the missteps of 2010, it’s necessary to really look at what worked and what didn’t.

Bring Together the Team. Go through the goals for 2010 and the ROI figures with the full team to keep everyone in the loop and to get their feedback. This is the time to look beyond the ROI numbers to see the factors that led to success and the challenges that led to failed programs.

Once you’ve gone through this process, make sure you put all this effort to work for you. Learn the lessons of 2010 and plan for success in 2011.

And in 2011, make sure you review your marketing plan regularly so you stay on target!

Erin Higgins
Director of Marketing Services
ehiggins@cmasolutions.com

Brandished Brands: How Yours Can Be a Household Name

A brand can be so strong, you don’t even use the general name for an item—“pass me a Kleenex,” “I’ll get you a Band-Aid,” “I owe you a Coke.” These are all excellent consumer success stories, but building a brand in the business-to-business space requires much more careful strategy to make sure you communicate your value well.

Whether you’re focusing on tapping new markets or maintaining existing ones, it’s important not to lose sight of how the right strategy and effective marketing tactics can position your brand as an easily identifiable entity. Even in complex B2B markets, keeping it simple sends a clear message. Cisco Systems, for example, has a vast product offering of network systems, collaboration/voice/video services and data center components, which can seem overwhelming to the prospective customer. But their brief, memorable taglines “see it, live it, share it” focus on the solutions they can provide businesses, automatically enhancing the perception of the brand.

In the business-to-consumer world, becoming a household name means you’ve created such awareness and positive perception that customers believe they have no other alternative. In the B2B world, your marketing approach is obviously more targeted to specific market segments. Often the most effective brand strategies are those that zero in on becoming the household name of a certain price class, geographic area or vertical market. The brand is brandished with creative key messages to instill certain beliefs in the customer.

For example, CMA recently worked with a 102 year old manufacturer of sound proof wall board made from recycled newspaper. With 4-5 other competitors vying for the loyalty of the same market segments, CMA advised the company to take the approach of being the “premium performance alternative for sound control.” This way, the company staked claim to the middle of the road price point and built brand loyalty among a specific clientele who would keep this in mind long term.

Let us help you become a leader or maintain your brand loyalty with fine-tuned strategies and tactics that communicate and resonate. Check out www.cmasolutions.com to learn more about our expertise.

Jeffrey Barnhart
President and CEO
jbarnhart@cmasolutions.com

Implementing new strategies: Where do we go from here?

Frequent readers of this blog and CMA’s newsletters have seen the word Marketecture(TM) used many times in relation to the development of a marketing strategy. Over the course of this analysis session, CMA clients play an integral role in identifying and analyzing the relationships between marketplace competitors and the criteria used by their target audiences in making buying decisions.

Where many marketing firms may fail to implement strategies discussed in these types of discovery sessions, CMA excels. Marketecture’s resulting tactical marketing plan creates a blueprint for the client’s marketing program and specifically spells out key messages and branding strategies as they relate to different key audience segments.

Our team frequently turns back to the report to keep brand consistency and guide a client through new initiatives, product launches and other types of company and/or market place changes. This is to be used as a guideline and working document as the plan may need to be amended as unforeseen developments occur.

It’s easy to become disillusioned in the current business climate and many companies may feel they have lost their way. Acting on disjointed directions, holding on to out-dated traditions or maintaining the status quo can be dangerous to a company that faces fierce competitors.

It’s hard to tell what lies ahead this year, but while it’s still early on in the first quarter, take some time to look inward to your brand, measure your ability to adapt to outside forces and move forward with tactics that work.

Jeffrey Barnhart
President and CEO
jbarnhart@cmasolutions.com