With 2015 just a few weeks away, you understand how important it is for your clients to regularly review their financial plans or policies to see if they need to make any necessary changes to keep them on track towards their financial goals.
The same is true for your business and therefore, you should be considering what your goals are for the New Year and making your own plans to ensure your business objectives are also on track.
From your operations, finance, sales and marketing, every element of your business will need to work together seamlessly to keep everything moving forward and improving on your success of 2014.
When looking at your marketing objectives, you may be considering how you can increase loyalty and revenue from existing clients as well as managing you growth by increasing the number of new clients on your books.
Understanding and putting in place a strong marketing strategy to help you reach your revenue and growth goals is a crucial element of sustaining your business. Reviewing the last years strategies and tactics against your KPIs to see how they performed and looking at where you need development is where your marketing strategy should start. The key points that would be covered are:
What short, medium and long-term business objectives do you need to address in the coming year?
Are there any regulatory changes or new financial legislation that will impact on how you do business moving forward and how will you deal with these?
Which print and digital communications are working well and which need to be improved?
Are there any new products or services that you intend to bring to market?
What are your revenue goals in total and by product?
What strategies and tactics will you use to help you reach those goals in each area and what is the anticipated return on investment?
What are your timelines and who are the key stakeholders?
What is your budget for the coming year?
What are your new / revised KPIs?
This level of detail will also help you analyse how you performed against your competitors and benchmark your overall service proposition.
Like any type of plan, a marketing strategy will keep you focused on the areas that are working well and may therefore benefit from further investment and those which either needs adjusting or scrapping all together.
Auditing and reviewing your financial promotions is a regulatory requirement and if you have a good process in place this will also help you develop your marketing strategy.
Without an adequate plan in place, you will be taking shots in the dark and hoping you can hit the target. If your business is important and generating growth and revenue is required to sustain it, you will need a marketing strategy to help you plan ahead and reach your goals...especially in such a fiercely competitive industry.
For advice and guidance on planning and implementing an effective marketing strategy, contact DPS Financial Marketing today.