You’ve decided to start your own business. You've put sweat and tears into developing strategies that led you to acquire your first clients. You’ve invested your money and now you want to know if your strategy is working effectively and if it's on budget. Are you really getting the most out of your investment?
To answer these questions you have to analyze your existing media:
Is it working?
What’s your return on investment (ROI)?
Do you know how to calculate it?
Do you know how much it costs you to acquire new customers?
How about how much you are spending on getting your message across different media drivers?
Here are four simple steps that will help you figure this out:
1) Identify Your Existing Media
What traditional media are you using?
Is it newspapers, T.V, telemarketing, magazines, video, direct mail, etc.?
Start counting…
Now let's analyze it! - Identify which of your communication efforts have been successful and which ones haven’t really moved the needle. You might already have an idea about this, but to be more precise we will need some numbers. Bring out that phone and let’s calculate your ROI.
How to do it? - Divide the total amount of money your company spent last year in marketing campaigns (this includes marketing, sales, and PR) by the total number of new customers acquired last year for each marketing campaign.
TADA! - The total is what costs you to acquire new customers or your ROI. Yup. It’s expensive to get new customers.
2) Who is doing the marketing?
Is it being done in-house or are you outsourcing to an advertising agency?
Are you allocating time and money the right way?
3) Identify and analyze your demographic groups
You know you have more than one! Identify your customer’s different characters and voices. Who likes commercials, who hates direct mail, who learns through video, audio, text, etc.? Who is no longer using Snapchat? Or who still swears by Twitter?
By answering these questions, you will be able to identify how many groups you have and who they are. You'll know what they like and what drives them. By doing this you will discover how to better target them whether it being by traditional media or social media marketing.
Determining the ROI of each group you will lead you to understand which form of communication/media is more effective on each of them. Identify what works and stop doing what doesn’t.
4) Analyze your communication strategy
Create a persona for each of your audiences by asking the following question; who are you? Then consider the following:
- Demographics - Description of the target audience.
- Brand - What is your company about and what does it stand for?
- Style - Speak your audience’s language.
- Message - What you want your audience to know.
- Frequency - How often you speak to your audience.
- Call to action - What you want your audience to do.
By determining the above, you will be able to create an ideal persona for each group. Create a brand with an authentic, engaging, and trustworthy identity. Wouldn’t you prefer buying something for this person rather than from a company?
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ANA CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ