The 5 Questions Every Marketing Leader Should Be Able to Answer

The role of a marketing leader is to spearhead the overall marketing strategy of a company’s product or service. It’s an often overlooked position – with plenty of resources dedicated instead to the business and sales aspect of a company. But make no mistake, the marketing leader drives the overall content strategy. Without effective branding and targeted advertising, a product will inevitably fail to convert.

Who are you trying to reach? What’s your audience demographic? Have you considered the best medium to reach said audience? Have you considered the latest trends?

Every marketing leader must be able to answer these questions. Why? Because a sound marketing strategy is a combined team effort, and you’d best ensure that your team leader is asking the right questions as well.

1. How Do You Plan On Tracking and Measuring Success?

When you’re trying to get audience conversion—it doesn’t matter if it’s a sale or a newsletter sign-up–you need to be able to track and measure success.

Every marketer worth his or her salt knows the golden rule of SEO and SEM: If you can measure it, you can improve it.

Influencer marketing is popular these days because we recognise the potential of social media as an advertising medium. But before you decide to engage an influencer, ask yourself this: How do you plan on tracking analytics? Paying someone to advertise your product on their Twitter feed with no way of tracking impressions, engagements and engagement rate is a rookie marketer’s mistake.

Does your marketing leader know how to use analytics? More importantly, does he or she know how to interpret said data?

2. What is Your Core Message?

We are not talking about your company’s vision or your product’s unique selling point. We are not even talking about the benefits or features of your product.

What is the main focus that’s driving your content or social media strategy? Are you a startup trying to gain traction and audience impression with users and investors? Are you trying to raise a seed round?

Or are you a company that is generating sustainable growth, and by growth we mean user take-up and product sales.

This is important. If you forget anything else in this article, don’t forget this: What are you trying to achieve with your campaign?

3. Have You Set Realistic Milestones?

Here we are going to take a page out of the popular Getting Things Done methodology (GTD).

Any project, no matter how large or small, can and must be broken down into the sum of its parts. That way you can tackle each task in a progressive and sustainable method.

Look at your overall marketing strategy and set appropriate milestones. It doesn’t matter if it’s ten weeks or ten months, make a solid plan that will act as a roadmap to guide you through the coming weeks or months.

But don’t make the rookie mistake of planning every single step of your strategy – that’s the old way of doing things. These days you have to learn to adapt quickly. That means your content strategy might change tomorrow. Having a roadmap means you can adapt as and when needed.

4. Do You Know What’s Trending?

The money is on the millennials – always remember that. 75% of all popular social media content is produced and consumed by millennials. If you want to learn to sell effectively, then you’d best learn a thing or two from and about this group of consumers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this core group of people are young and have disposable income. Find out who they are, what they like, which cafes they frequent, their habits, their likes and dislikes. Meet with them, talk with them, get into their heads. That is the only way you will learn how to convert them into life-long customers.

Which brings us to our last point:

5. Have You Walked In Their Shoes?

Do you actually believe what you sell? Do you stand by your content even if they get picked up and flogged by the media for all the wrong reasons? Do you blindly agree with the analytics that your team hands you?

Marketers take their direction from above. But as a marketing leader and influencer, you need to stand by firmly with your product. That means in order to develop a rich customer experience, you need to feel compelled as well. Ask yourself when was the last time you walked the ground and rolled up your sleeves and got your hands dirty.

Walk in your customers’ shoes and you will identify the gaps in your marketing strategy. Whether they are conflicting product messages, inconsistent pricing or poor user experience, these can only be discovered if you engage with your customers.

Conclusion

As a marketing leader, you must be able to answer these 5 questions. More importantly, does your team believe and act the same way? Are they truly concerned about the user experience of a landing page? Is your writer crafting content that is targeting the keywords surrounding your core message? Are they keeping up with trends and identifying what is or isn’t aligned with their product?

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