Before you jump into marketing your business, product or service, and whenever you assess any possible marketing strategies and opportunities, you need to ask lots of questions.
The following questions (I confess, there are more than 10 of them, but I’ve grouped them into 10 categories) might be useful discussion-starters with your team:
- What is our product/service? What business are we in, really?
- Who uses/buys our product/service, and why (and who doesn’t and why)? What motivates them? What benefits do they expect? What problems does our product/service solve for them? What results do they get from using our product/service? How does it make them FEEL?
- What is our message or story? What are our values? What do we stand for?
- Who do we want to communicate that message to, both within our organisation and externally (existing, past and potential customers/members/shareholders/employees/volunteers/sponsors; other like-minded organisations in our city and globally; possible business allies; competitors; industry and financial analysts; legislators; government bureaucrats; any people/organisations that we do business with; the media; our local community; anybody who’s affected by what we do, etc., etc.)?
- What is the most effective way to reach/influence our audiences? How do they prefer to gather and assess information? Whose opinions do they respect? Which magazines/newspapers/eNewsletters/websites/blogs do they read? Which radio stations/programmes do they listen to? Which TV stations/programmes do they watch? Which social media channels do they use? What kind of business/social functions do they attend? What other organisations do they belong to? Where can we find them?
- How much will it cost, and how much are we willing to spend, to communicate our message?
- How much income/profit (if any) do we want or expect to earn as a result?
- What other results do we expect (in terms of membership growth, attendance at our events, media coverage, twitter followers, Facebook “Likes”, eNewsletter subscribers, etc.)?
- Who is actually going to do the marketing tasks — and when?
- How will we measure the qualitative and quantitative results of our marketing activities?
Do you have any other helpful questions to add to the list?
