Why not all marketing information is important or useful.

If you’ve read my previous article on why understanding is critical to marketing, you’ll known the importance of research and collecting information and data on your market, customers and competitors. 

Yet not all information is important. The second door of marketing leads to an activity called ANALYSIS.

You are going to collect a lot of information and hear a lot of opinion about your market, your customers and your competitors. This might come from customers themselves, or your staff, or from reading the social media posts of some marketing guru.

Here is a simple truth about information. It isn’t all of the same importance. 

Here is a way to judge the information you collect. Does it help you understand your customer better? Does it help you make decisions about your marketing programs? Does it shine a light on knowledge about what marketing channels your customer might use to research and select products and services in your market segment? Does it allow you to improve the effectiveness or efficiency of your marketing? Does it act like a lightbulb giving you a sudden awareness of something that was missing from your business, or your marketing? 

In these cases you could consider that information to be important. 

Here’s an example. 

Suppose you find in your marketing that a very small percentage of your elderly customers use social media. This could save you a lot of time worrying about social media marketing. Let’s suppose most of your customers ask their friends for recommendations about suppliers of your service. A word of mouth or referral campaign would be far more successful for you than wasting money on advertising. Just ask your existing customers to refer you, and reward their referrals. 

Here’s another example

You find that the customers of your bespoke food retail product are very active on Facebook and on Facebook Groups. You decide on the basis of this research that running paid Facebook Advertising would be a wise approach to attract customers. 

We did this recently for a client in this space, and generated 437 leads in a little more than two months. Each lead cost just over $4 per lead, significantly improving both their lead acquisition costs and their conversion rates due to better demographic targeting.

It is important to be discerning with information and the source of that information as to how important it is, or how valuable it is to you. 

If it helps you to understand more than you did before, or to make decisions, or invites more questions you didn’t previously even know to ask, then the information is valuable. 

If not, it’s not - simple as that. 

We’ve seen examples where business owners asked their family and friends whether they thought their product was good. They got a positive and glowing response, but unfortunately their marketing failed because none of these family and friends were in the right demographic for the product, and none of them knew anything about the market or competition. So their ‘opinion’ whilst nice and warm and cuddly actually had no value and probably cost the business owner a lot of wasted time and money when they relied on it to move forward with their business idea. 

Take any information with a grain of salt until it passes your test of useful, value and therefore important to your plans. 

Photo by KAT on Unsplash

The way you assess the value of information is to use a variety of marketing tools including:

1. A SWOT Analysis - a tool to list your strengths and weaknesses, plus market opportunities and threats and to decide what you should focus on in your marketing

2. A Competitor Analysis - a tool to find out relative strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and to support a decision about what market position is the best for you

3. Porters Five Forces - a tool to look at market dynamics and where the power lies in a market, allowing you to adapt your marketing to fit the market dynamics. 

4. VRIO - a tool that helps you to interrogate sources of competitive advantage

If you’d like to know more about how to assess information for importance and ANALYSE information for your marketing plan, read my books - Marketing has no Off Switch or Get your Marketing Cooking - both available on AMAZON.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07DHG3RY4

Hunter Leonard is the Founder & CEO of Blue Frog Marketing - a strategic consultancy with clients in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Hunter is highly respected in the industry, having achieved spectacular revenue growth results for his clients in the order of several billion dollars. He has written 11 books and delivered over 900 seminars and workshops on marketing since 2001. When not helping clients, he can be found playing his Mason Guitar, cooking up a storm or walking the forests, beaches and national parks of his home town of Coffs Harbour. www.bluefrogmarketing.com.au