Marketing Audit

It’s always a good idea to start with an audit of your marketing activity. Understanding what works well, what doesn’t and why provides valuable insight when it comes to mapping out a marketing plan that delivers results and helps avoid any tried and tested campaigns that simply don’t work for your business. It also helps to identify any gaps that need our attention.

Competitor analysis forms an important part of any audit. We’re not looking to copy the competition but there’s no harm in having a better understanding on what they are doing and its impact especially those things that are working well that we should also be considering.

Budget Management

Once we’ve carried out an audit and put together the marketing strategy we need to map this on to the marketing budget. The size of your business and turnover usually determines the marketing spend for the year ahead. It could be a figure agreed with finance in advance or you may have to justify and pitch for each marketing investment.

ASH Marketing & Events can work closely with you to research the costs associated with the various campaigns you want to run. Whether your budget is big or small, we can help find solutions that give you the results you want for great value for money. As every business knows marketing is a big discretionary spend so making sure you deliver projects on time and to budget is critical to its success and continued investment.

Strategy Planning

Once we have a good understanding on the sorts of marketing that work and don’t work for your business we can start to plan your marketing strategy. To be successful and ensure we maximise the return on investment we will work closely with the key stakeholders in your company whether that is senior management, product team or sales, to understand their objectives and priorities making sure the marketing plan supports those key business initiatives.  

Getting buy-in and support from the business and its stakeholders is critical to the success of your marketing campaigns. Social media only works if you have something to say and people to manage the feeds, email campaigns will have limited success if no one follows them up, events can be expensive unless you have a team pre-booking meetings and make the most of being there. You get the idea – you can be successful but it’s hard work without the help of others. You’re a team so you all need to work together to ensure the success of the business as a whole. Feedback and insight from customer facing staff is imperative to the continued success and effectiveness of our campaigns.

Integrated Campaigns

You may have come across this term but what does it mean and why is it important. To make the most of your marketing investment, we need to make sure we run integrated campaigns.

Whilst a campaign in isolation can be successful, your success and response rates increase exponentially if you repeat the campaign across numerous forms of communication. For one campaign to be successful you have to place it in exactly the right place at the right time. But, if you run variations of the campaigns at the same time or concurrently, all with the same look, feel and message, just simply repurposed for the type of communication being used, you will increase your chances of reaching your target audience building awareness around who you are and what you do. Even if they miss one campaign the chances are they will see another somewhere else or seeing a series of campaigns simply reinforces the message and increases the likelihood that your message reaches the right person and resonates with your target audience.
To ensure you get the most out of your investment its crucial to run integrated marketing; a series of campaigns with a consistent look, feel and message across a variety of communication platforms.