Many areas of business incorporate continuous improvement, ensuring that processes are streamlined to maximise efficiencies and to reduce costs.
Unfortunately, marketing is an area that is often overlooked, resulting in either aggressive cost cutting during economic downturns, or a rush to the latest buzzwords, with little strategic thought and consideration and returns.
Marketing like all other aspects of a business should be held into account, and needs to adopt a framework that fosters continuous improvement.
Our Syneka Marketing Framework, with our cycle of Audit, Plan and Execution, is designed to incorporate the feedback mechanisms required to improve business decisions, while identifying performance indicators and measuring outcomes.
The Framework commences with an Audit as this enables you to assess current marketing activities and to incorporate metrics that evaluate outcomes. The Audit phases answers the question of how to maximise the return from marketing investment. This phase strengthens the measurability of marketing and provides input into the broader business direction.
The Plan aligns business goals with marketing outcomes, positioning marketing as the centre for innovation that drives business capacity. Importantly, this phase helps avoid a silo mentality, by embedding a whole of marketing approach and strengthening internal communications. As a result, marketing is able to guide business growth, through the identification of new market opportunities and aligning the customer experience across a business. The Marketing Plan guides not only short-term actions, but also longer term initiatives that will be achieved that strengthen business capacity.
The Execution component represents the implementation of actions identified in the Audit and Plan phases and is guided by the metrics that have been identified in the earlier phases. The embedding of metrics ensures that there is an ongoing review of marketing outcomes and that value is being achieved. The aim is to move beyond marketing for the sake of marketing and into an approach that provides a measurable return on investment.
The Framework reinforces the fact that marketing can and should be measured, moving beyond basic measurements and into metrics that actually matter for business growth. The approach enables marketing to step up and drive business outcomes, rather than being reactive and missing the ability to influence strategic decisions.
Further details are available in our eBook A Marketing Framework for Ongoing Performance.
