Your company’s standing in the market is vital whether you are a small business or a large organisation. Suppose you are looking to expand your existing market or to launch a new product or service and decide to seek expert marketing advice from gigCMO. On engagement, the first step of one of our fractional chief marketing officers is to do a benchmark audit to ensure your company’s success in the market. The audit will help shape the engagement and prioritise areas of focus.
How clear is your competitive advantage?
Competitive advantage is a principal component of any business that wants to compete successfully in the market. Most firms do not adequately articulate or take advantage of what makes their product, service or overall brand different from their competitors. If you can not state this in one to three sentences, you can not outbid others for market share.
Even then, it is not enough to have it documented; it should be incorporated into the business strategy and integrated into all initiatives.
At gigCMO, we ensure that companies have a positioning that distinguishes them from their competitors.
How do you find and solve your customer’s problems?
Most companies do not realise the power of information about their customers. Many companies collect data but rarely examine it for insights, or in some extreme cases, they collect in a manner it is not possible to interrogate it. Customer database management provides a platform to enable your company to better understand your customer’s behaviourwith the ultimate aim to increase customer conversions and retention.
We ask some key questions in our engagement Is data management fragmented with no clear perspective on customer profiles? We have encountered businesses that are not collecting customer data and therefore struggle to fully define their customer’s pain points.
With a clean, consolidated database, you can better understand and manage client experience for sales conversion. A client-centric database will provide actionable customer insights, which is invaluable for the performance of your product or service in the market.
What are the needs of the top 80% of your customers?
Furthermore, it is not enough to rely on secondary data sources alone. An informed perspective of your customers is not sufficient until you directly communicate with them. Your best feedback comes from talking to clients directly. Managing client relationships is essential for the identification of pain points.
Also, although it makes sense to have meaningful, regular discussions with the top 10-20% of your existing customers, you need to understand the wants and experiences of at least 80% of your current customers. Some of our CEO Whisperers have been engaged to provide a formal feedback loop with clients and their key senior executives to ensure that your business keeps progressing forward.
How well do you know your target market?
Market segmentation enables you to understand your target customers clearly and should be central to your market strategy. Customers are more heterogeneous than we like to think, and markets for different categories of customers are constantly evolving. Therefore, it is crucial to have a crystal clear view of the market characteristics that are synonymous with each sub-section of customers and to ensure that this is continuously updated.
By articulating your market segments, gigCMO provides a time and cost-effective way of finding the pain points of your target customers. For example, knowing your target companies and job titles in b2b business companies. Adequate market segmentation generates better marketing ROI and promotes a greater brand appeal that improves customer acquisition and retention.
How do you communicate the value of the product or service that you are selling?
So now that we have a consolidated customer database, gigCMO will assist you in creating compelling sales value propositions (SVPs) that capture the customer’s needs, wants, pains and overall expectations. These SVPs will be clear, concise, justifiable, adaptable and scalable. SVPs not only helps to fine-tune your strategy to attract new customers and informs your approach for existing ones. By doing this, we are ensuring that you are spending your company time and resources efficiently.
What do you include in your marketing collateral?
Marketing collateral refers to the collection of media and other materials that function as brand communication or sales support tools. These range from website content creation to visual aids in sales presentations and physical product promotion.
Every business makes use of support tools to make for more manageable and effective sales of products or services. Because of this, you should consider the kind of material you include in your marketing collateral.
While some businesses use inconsistent material that does not significantly enhance sales performance, excellent marketing that generates sales involves consistently using collateral written around customer needs to drive the selling process.
How aligned are your sales and marketing efforts?
In most organisations, sales and marketing are interdependent entities. Therefore, when sales and marketing efforts are completely aligned, it works best. Aligning your company’s sales and marketing department is essential because if they don't work together, it creates a critical gap that translates to lost sales opportunities and wasted resources.
Consolidating data and collaborating efforts across your sales and marketing department is vital for your company’s growth and overall performance. A supportive climate between both sales and marketing teams will translate to a creative, flexible and well-rounded view of the costs and value of customers categories and the lead conversion process of your company.
How do you generate leads that convert to sales?
All companies should be interested in lead generation because this is the route to commercial success. At gigCMO, we always ask - what is the process of getting your prospective customers to close on sales?
Distinct from marketing leads, it should be clear to your company how you obtain and retain sales qualified leads. This is because they are the ones who are ready to close on sales inquiries. These prospects are those that make regular, unprompted enquiries about your business.
Understanding your lead generation process is effective for proactive and personalised marketing campaigns guaranteed to increase the sales and profitability of your business.
Is your Marketing Budget Effective?
Interestingly, most companies, even smaller businesses, designate a significant proportion of their budget towards marketing. However, despite this financial commitment, some companies still do not understand the return on marketing investment (ROMI). We work with your team to understand your ROMI and identify how to continue to increase it.
What is your Marketing Expenditure compared to Sales Performance?
It is important to look at financial and non-financial metrics to understand how your marketing budget translates to sales performance. Some non-financial metrics include qualitative measures such as customer satisfaction, market share or category ownership, the adoption rate for new products. Our task at gigCMO as marketing experts is to help to show how those non-financial metrics drive revenue and contribute to the bottom line.
If you do not have clear answers to any of these questions, a fractional CMO is what you need for business success. We do a deep dive at no extra cost to understand your business pain points and gaps in the marketing strategy and provide pragmatic, actionable advice to drive business performance.
To hire a fractional CMO, contact us today.
