10 Marketing Questions You Should Be Asking

Working without clear goals can lead to the adoption of various strategies that aren’t working. Marketing teams require a set plan that outlines short- and long-term goals in order to develop a consistent brand strategy. Marketing teams, in assessing their efforts, should centre their questions around their shared goals, performance, and overall organisation.

In this post, we’ll discuss the top 10 marketing questions to ask yourselves to increase customer loyalty, improve brand awareness and brand visibility.

1. What’s your brand strategy?

Your brand is more than the logo, slogan, or name—it is the customer experience users have with the organisation, product, or service. Developing your brand strategy involves discerning who your buyer persona is, where you want your brand to be positioned, and developing your messaging, logo, tagline, content strategy and website around that unified vision.

2. Are you asking Should Ask Questions?

To continue to be helpful and provide consistent value to your customers, your business will need to pose a series of questions that customers or prospects don’t ask but should be asking. Forming Should Ask Questions (SAQ) will enable your company to anticipate and resolve client concerns before they occur. When marketers view their brand/product in the lens of a curious buyer and form marketing questions and answers around that product, then they can get inside the head of their target audience and foresee their concerns.

3. How are you leveraging big data?

Leveraging big data and analytics enable you to identify your target demographic, understand consumer behaviour, trends, and preferences, and stay ahead of the competition. Today, 91% of marketers are “somewhat confident”’ or “very confident” that they’re investing in programmes that influence revenue; so make sure your team understands what tools and software it uses to generate analytics reports and data, and what other marketers are using, to stay ahead of the curve.

4. What are your customer retention strategies?

Generating and acquiring new leads is great, but a high customer turnover rate can be detrimental to any business. When marketers focus too much of their attention on capturing leads, they can lose track of their customer retention strategies. Make use of email marketing tactics, follow-up calls, texts, or meetings to retain customers and nurture relationships with them.

5. How compelling is your content?

Creating compelling, unique content is one of the best ways to attract prospects to your brand. Your content strategy should be aligned around your brand strategy as a whole, keeping your brand’s messaging consistent despite the variation in the content itself. Look into automation tools to track the reception of your content across platforms.

6. What is your metric of success?

How do your success metric parameters interact with your objectives? Understanding which metrics to use to measure your success will help guide your marketing efforts in a more streamlined manner. Success metrics can include ROI or revenue, qualified leads, engagements, or email and newsletter sign-ups. For eCommerce businesses, revenue and leads are the most common metrics. Interestingly, 67% of companies use lead generation as the sole metric to determine content success.

7. How are you tracking results?

To determine whether your digital marketing campaigns are successful, companies should test their effectiveness through A/B testing. A/B tests can help you calculate which campaigns, CTAs or even colour schemes work on what audience. Your marketing team should also be employing tools to track ROI and the number of conversions generated from your site and social media. Currently, just over 75% of marketers are reporting on how their campaigns are directly influencing revenue.

8. Where is your competition lacking?

Identify what your competitors are failing to deliver to their audience and deliver it to them yourself. Analytics and social listening tools provide marketers with valuable consumer information; giving you useful insight into what consumers in the industry are saying and expecting from brands. Knowing what unmet needs exist among consumers is a powerful way to increase sales and boost customer loyalty.

9. How is your product development?

When marketers come up with ways to develop their product in a way that gains traction among consumers, it will sell. Knowing how to effectively develop your product will require an understanding of the market itself and the cost targets. The marketing team should have a clear approach to this and should be surveying the right software and tech to achieve it.

10. Are you tracking referral rates?

As you may know, inbound marketing thrives off of a self-sustainable flywheel. Namely, when you delight your customers with your product/service and they refer your business to their friends and social circles. Tracking and calculating referral rates can help inform you about the success of your campaigns, and what percentage of sales were made by referral customers. On the other hand, if you have no referrals but high sales figures, it can indicate that there is less unity in delivering on customer expectations, which should be promptly addressed.