About a month ago I read the following post: The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business on the MarketingProfs site. It’s a pretty interesting article and worth a read, particularly where it pushes for more data and real examples to be used to back up all the advice and information that gets bandied about concerning marketing most of the time.
However, there were two other things that struck me about this article:
- It talks about marketing in the title but only refers to social media marketing in the post. Let’s be clear. Social media marketing is an element of the marketing tools and tactics that are available to us as businesses but it is not the whole thing.
- The post spends most of its time analysing and commenting on the folks that are writing about and marketing their marketing services and less about marketing end producer/consumer businesses.
I understand that the MarketingProfs site is mainly targeted at marketing professionals but, even so, I felt that there was a disconnect between the title and the content.
But, this post is not all moan as the original post did prompt me to think about the title and what would be the questions I would ask if I were marketing someone’s or your business.
I thought about this for a while and came up with a long list of questions but then boiled them right down to two questions that will tell you everything you need to know to start with:
- How much of your current business comes from existing clients and how much comes from new clients?
- How much of your marketing efforts are focused on generating new clients and how much is focused on generating repeat business from your existing clients?
Answering those questions will give you a set of numbers that will help you understand quickly the marketing make-up of your business, start to identify what is working and where things can be improved to generate better results.
Do you have those numbers to hand?
In my following post(s), I’ll explore what I think those numbers can tell you about your business and what you can do with them.
Til then.
