Areas Covered by Measure Marketing

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines it as ‘The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer/ client requirements profitably’.

It’s not just advertising and pretty pictures but a discipline which encourages every business to think about its customers and clients, to understand what they want, what influences them, how they want to be communicated with and how they want to purchase the services or products they decide to buy. This should shape the way a business decides what to sell, how much to sell it for, how to promote it and how to deliver it to them.

To help us think about every aspect, Marketers will consider what’s known as the 7 ‘Ps’ – Product, Price, Promotion, Place, People, Process and Physical evidence – when considering their marketing strategy and planning.

When put together, they build a plan with the primary objective of ensuring your prospective purchaser chooses you rather than one of your competitors.

Your service or product + personality = Your brand

Very few products and services are unique, most have competitors that offer similar products or services. So how do your customers or clients pick you?

What’s your business personality? Do you know it? Do your customers and clients know it? Your business personality is what makes you stand out from your competitors and you need to be able to define it and make it tangible.

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it…

Social Media, to give it its full term, can be simply defined as websites and applications that enable users (you and I) to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

Content can be anything that can be shared on the web with websites or ‘platforms’ that can accomodate words (e.g. Twitter), pictures (e.g. Instagram), videos (e.g. YouTube), music (e.g. TikTok), reviews (e.g. Trip Adviser) and a mixture of everything (e.g. Facebook).

As the only boundaries that exist are those created by the websites, applications or platforms themselves, social media content is able to reach significant numbers of people across the world very quickly (going viral). This is both a positive and a negative.

Businesses using social media channels to communicate with their prospective customers must be aware of the risks as well as the benefits and have contingency plans ready for every eventuality.

Every interaction we have with any business, product or service creates a perception of that business, product or service good or bad.

This determines how we feel, whether we’re pleased or not and likely to recommend it in future. This perception is our customer or client experience.

Think about the best meal you ever had out. I’m sure the food was fantastic but it’s unlikely that was the main reason it was so memorable. The service, the atmosphere, the company will have all added something special to the experience. It is not enough just to provide a service or sell a product anymore. To earn recommendations and to have loyal customers and clients, you must deliver an experience they remember!

Customer and Client Experience Management and techniques such as customer journey mapping help organisations create these memorable moments.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts – William Bruce Cameron (1963)

Measuring your performance is the key to improving it. Technology enables us to capture vast quantities of information (e.g. Big Data) across most aspects of an organisation now. But, as William Cameron noted, knowing what’s important to your business and how you use it are the essential elements of any successful Management Information/ Data Science plan.

With the right tools and measurements in place you have the ability to identify areas for business improvement and ways to increase your profitability.

Design is the visualisation of your ideas.

It brings your brand personality to life, separates you from your competitors and draws customers and clients to you. Without it, you’re the same as everyone else and who wants that?