Frequently Asked Marketing Questions
Questions About Why Marketing is Important and Where to Start
Question: How important is marketing for manufacturing businesses?
Answer: Many manufacturers have been marketing for ages, but the ones you typically see reaching down through the supply chain are fashion, lifestyle or OEM brands. These companies have mastered their marketing initiatives and incorporated them into business practices for years. They understand that marketing supports their brand and drives sales. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s B2B Content Marketing Report, top B2B performers are successful because they have a content marketing strategy in place and continually measure its performance. These businesses use content to build trust with customers, nurture prospects and drive sales performance. Learn more about marketing a manufacturing business.
Question: Why is marketing a continuous process?
Answer: Even when marketing campaigns are successful, there is always room for improvement. Don’t think of marketing as a continuous burden, but rather an opportunity to continually analyze your efforts and find ways to tweak activities to create more growth. Continuous improvement in your marketing programs helps to achieve a stronger return on your investment. There is always the opportunity to increase the accuracy of targeting, product attributes or service quality, customer satisfaction or gather higher-quality leads. Not to mention, audiences and technologies are always changing and you need to adapt your processes with them.
Question: Why do I need a marketing plan?
Answer: A marketing plan is one of the most important business tools for any company. It is the missing connection between the directional vision of your business and delivering results. A strategic marketing plan ensures leadership, sales and marketing are aligned, enabling your team to proactively complete activities and allow you to better track success. It’s the glue that connects everything together and ensures that the right activities take place at the right time in front of the right audience through the right channels. Learn more about creating a marketing plan.
Question: What is the primary purpose of a mission statement?
Answer: A mission statement is a brief description of a company’s purpose for being. It answers the fundamental question, “Why does your business exist?” It’s typically a sentence or short paragraph designed to define how a company will turn a profit. For example, Tesla’s mission statement is “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Question: What is a vision statement and how is it different from the mission statement?
Answer: While a mission statement defines why a company exists, a vision statement is different because it focuses on a company’s future. It answers the question, “Where is my business going?” It’s a picture of what your company will be years in the future. It’s your inspiration and serves as the framework for your strategy. For example, Microsoft’s original vision statement was “A computer on every desk at every home.” It’s ambitious. It won’t take outline how the vision will be reached—that will be outlined in the business plan. Its aim is to only be the inspiration for actions.
Question: How do I create a value proposition for my business?
Answer: The value proposition works alongside the mission and vision statements and summarizes why a customer should purchase your product or service. It communicates the benefits customers receive by giving your company their business. It should speak to the customer’s challenge and set you up to be the problem solver. To create a simple value proposition, it helps to fill this equation: “We help (a description of the customer/audience) do (a challenge or fear of the customer) by doing (your product or service).” For example, a value proposition might be “We help automotive manufacturers reduce in-process inventory with custom inventory management solutions and by producing on-demand product within quality-control standards.”
Question: How do I set marketing goals?
Answer: Everything within a business is all about goals. Without goals, there is no way to track if your efforts are successful. According to CoSchedule research, business professionals who set goals are “376% more likely to report success than those who don’t.” The reason? Goals provide clarity so you don’t get lost in the day-to-day activities. With clear goals in place, you can set a plan in place to achieve them. To get started creating goals, make them SMART.
Specific: Your goals must be focused on one clear idea, one metric. For example, increase visitor search traffic to your website.
Measurable: You need to have a way to measure the metric. Such as increasing visitor search traffic to your site by x%.
Aspirational: Push yourself outside the realm of natural possibilities. If your website traffic naturally receives 100 visitors from search results, aim for 175.
Realistic: While aspirational is important, you need to keep it realistic still so it can be attained. Jumping from 100 visitors to 2,000 visitors won’t likely happen, but 175 is manageable.
Time-Bound: Set yourself a date that you need to reach the goal by so you can hold yourself and your team accountable.
Your end goal may look like this: To increase monthly website visitor traffic from search results by 20% by the end of quarter 3 this year. When your goals are set and the campaigns are done, learn how to analyze your efforts and aim for continuous improvement.
Question: What are the elements of a good marketing campaign?
Answer: The top five elements that make a good marketing campaign are:
Goals: Make sure they are SMART (as mentioned earlier) to keep your business focused and your efforts effective.
Understand your customer or targeted audience: Don’t think you understand your customer, research to know you thoroughly understand them.
Quality content: Speak to the need, fear or challenges of the audience you are targeting and communicate that you have a solution that they can’t find elsewhere.
Promotion: Select the right channels at the right time. If your audience can’t find your promotion, it won’t produce results.
Call to action: Let the audience know what they need to do. Are they making a purchase in a limited time? Are they registering for your event with early-bird pricing? Set the bait by letting them know what they should be doing and hook them with why they don’t want to miss out.
Questions about Marketing Tools and Techniques
Question: What is the difference between outbound and inbound marketing?
Answer: If you have ever been tasked with creating a marketing plan, you may have heard the terms inbound marketing and outbound marketing tossed around. It’s important to understand their differences and build a mix of both into your plan. They each have unique applications, benefits and challenges—when used correctly, together they offer a lot of opportunities for success. Inbound marketing focuses on creating and distributing content that organically draws people into your business. It’s subtle and takes time. Some examples of inbound marketing include blogs, testimonials, case studies, whitepapers, social media, SEO, videos and podcasts. Outbound marketing sends a message to a large audience in hopes of making a sale. It’s typically more aggressive and time sensitive. Examples of outbound marketing include direct mail, billboards, cold calling, pay-per-click advertising, magazine ads and tradeshows.
Question: Why is a mobile responsive website important?
Answer: In today’s tech-focused world, nearly everyone within your audience moves between desktops, laptops and phones. It’s critical that your site be viewable across as many of these devices as possible because you can’t predict where your website traffic will come from. It’s important that your site appeals to everyone—especially since most website traffic comes from mobile devices. But choosing a design for your website that responds to everyone offers benefits:
Cost effective: You won’t have to buy and maintain a desktop-only and mobile-only site. If you make changes, you make it to one site. If you market your site, you only do it once.
Improves a user’s experience: If users can easily and quickly navigate and use your site, they will like it, stay on it, perhaps return to it and know you’re a professional at what you do.
Gains favorability with search engines: Google gives preference to websites that are mobile friendly—in addition to those that incorporate SEO efforts.
Question: Why is SEO important for business?
Answer: SEO is the most viable and cost-effective way to understand your audience and reach them in moments that matter—when they are looking for you and your products or services. SEO improves your website’s searchability and visibility. When your audiences are searching, you want them to find your business—not a competitor.
Question: What is digital marketing?
Answer: Digital marketing is a subcategory of marketing activities that uses electronic devices to promote your content and measure its impact. The term refers to marketing campaigns that appear on computers, phones, tablets and other devices. Some examples of digital marketing include videos, blogs, digital ads, social media, podcasts and SEO.
Question: Why should I consider social media for my business?
Answer: Social media for businesses is no longer a marketing technique to consider, but rather a “must have” as part of your strategic marketing plan. It’s an essential way to reach your audiences—prospective and existing customers—gain valuable understanding about your audiences and develop your brand awareness. Thankfully, starting a social media plan is an easy, low-commitment way to speak to your audience, promote events, and share your industry insights. It can also be a great way to generate leads and fill your sales funnel. Find out just how successful social media can be for a business.
Question: How do I analyze my marketing programs?
Answer: Evaluating a marketing program is an essential part of business. As part of any plan you make, you should build in mechanisms to monitor the success of your efforts. A few ways to analyze the effectiveness of marketing programs include:
Check for changes in sales. The goal of any activity is to improve sales. Compare pre- and post-campaign sales to the originally forecasted numbers.
Conduct surveys. If marketplace perceptions were the goal of the campaign, conduct surveys before and after the campaign to illustrate successes or losses.
Compare your activities to competitors. If you and your competitors are running similar programs, you can take note of some of their metrics early on (followers, number of advertisements and frequencies, and responses) and see how their metrics change over time.
Compared the outcome against goals. If you created campaign goals, the best way to measure campaign effectiveness is to compare final metrics against the goals.
For more answers on how to analyze marketing campaigns, in more detail look no further.
Question: What is content marketing?
Answer: Content marketing is a type of marketing that strategically involves the development and promotion of valuable and relevant messaging to attract a specific audience. The difference between content marketing and any other form of marketing is that with content marketing, people want to consume it and more that you have to offer. Why? Because they see it as valuable. Content marketing can also pair with sales efforts to drive revenue. A few popular options are: infographics, blogs, podcasts, internal communications and thought leadership pieces such as whitepapers.
Do you have more questions? Are you looking for input from a team experienced in marketing industrial and manufacturing businesses? Contact our crew for help.
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