How can you pinpoint gaps in your marketing strategy?

After defining the SWOT, I'd complement it by adding the "5 Whys" technique. We shouldn't just stack our KPIs against numbers; instead, we should compare them to what our customers really want. After all, numbers provide direction, but understanding people? That's the real game-changer.

Start with organizational goals and whether marketing is well-positioned to lead or support the organization's ability to achieve those goals. Interview key stakeholders in and outside of marketing who share those goals to learn what marketing could be doing differently. Where are you over- or underperforming against organizational goals and why? Assess, where there are gaps in expectations, whether those gaps relate to strategic alignment, operational plans, tactical execution, or resource allocation. As an executive leader, focus your efforts on improving strategic alignment by establishing or reestablishing the goals of marketing to better align with organizational goals, rather than department goals. Be a leader first, then a marketer.

If you don't have a competitive edge you will have to fight competition. How do you know if that's the case? Offering discounts and negotiating prices with clients is a good sign of not being competitive. Thus you don't fill a gap in the market, you offer some form of a vague improvement offer. We do it: ? better ? faster ? cheaper The opposite is to make a new paradigm shift by solving a problem that matters for your ICP in a new way.

Pinpointing gaps in your marketing strategy is essential for achieving optimal results. The mentioned approach of auditing your current situation, encompassing SWOT analysis and KPI evaluation, is indeed a strategic move. By delving into your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you gain valuable insights into areas that require enhancement. Comparing KPIs against benchmarks provides a clear picture of your progress and highlights potential disparities. This proactive approach enables timely adjustments and ensures your strategy remains effective and aligned with your business objectives.

Identifying gaps starts with first understanding your own metrics. Where are you seeing gaps within your own data? Is no one clicking on your ad or visiting your site? Are you getting millions of people to your site but then seeing that after someone sees your pricing, no one buys? Those are two very different problems to solve, but it's an important first step to something greater. After you've identified the gaps in your data, you have to test, test, test, to solve it. If you aren't getting traffic, are you actually targeting the right audience? If you aren't getting purchases, have you tested different price points, free trials, etc. in order to get people actually using your product?

If a feature set is being asked for, or promotion is not resonating, it could be your marketing. There are many reasons for this, I'll focus on defining the ideal customer. Marketing needs to set up sales, by softening resistance, and raising awareness, so revenue can be generated. This equals sustainability. In a few years’ a big percentage of revenue will come from offerings you don't have, with customers you don't yet know. Get this right. Use any of a variety of methods to define the ideal customer. I prefer in-person discovery. Probe at needs, pull at unstated wants, test what your hypothesis against customer input. Your company may have a blind spot, maybe they are too close to be objective? Dig to gather customer-provided info.

You have to know your audience so you can market the solution to their problem. I once worked in an industry that claimed it’s target demographic was young mothers. That was far from the truth and we gained a competitive advantage by surveying and figuring out the true customer. Ads started doing better, open rates increased, and sales soared. We then took all our audience pools and created specific journeys for them. After all, a customer may not purchase for a variety of reasons, so you need to understand those and know how to show your value. If you don’t know your customer, you don’t know how to share your value.

Knowing who you will buy your products/services is vital part of any marketing strategy's success. Without an ideal customer persona (and segmentation) it would be hard to sell anything to anyone. Why? It's because by knowing who and why people buy (their problem) you can provide a better solution (service).

Creating a detailed profile for each of them and an avatar to represent each one is a fun practice. In fancy terms, it's called creating a ?????????? ??????????????, which is a fictional representation of your ideal customers based on real data and insights about your target audience.

If you're marketing to everyone, you're effectively marketing to no one. Create detailed buyer personas – think about their age, interests, pain points, and where they hang out online. For instance, if you're selling vegan skincare products, your ideal customer might be a health-conscious millennial who frequents Instagram and values sustainability. Targeting becomes much sharper when you know who's in your crosshairs.

?????????? ?????? ?????????? ???????? ???? ?????????? is an important practice; it reflects all of your values and beliefs and communicates your message directly to your target audience.

A gap in a marketing strategy is not "everyone else is doing something and we're not." A strategic gap is "we're projected to come up short on a certain goal and we don't know how to do fix this yet." So don't get fixated on chasing every new shiny object that comes along. Just focus on your goals and achieving them — with or without shiny objects.

This is an important piece, especially as it relates to taking a look at where leads fall off. Look at which touch points convert people further down the funnel and which ones don’t show similar success and then look into why that’s happening.

Product: Understand your customer's needs and tailor your offering to ease their pain points. Price: Deliver value beyond cost, differentiating yourself from competitors. Place: Ensure easy accessibility to your target audience. Promotion: Guide customers from awareness to purchase through a well-rounded marketing approach.

4Ps Alignment: Scrutinize your product, price, place, and promotion to ensure they meet market and customer needs. 3Ds Consistency: Check differentiation, positioning, and branding for clear communication of your unique value. People, Process, Technology: Ensure skilled teams, streamlined processes, and cutting-edge technology work in concert. Execution Excellence: Critically analyze the deployment of your marketing tactics to guarantee flawless execution and impact. This comprehensive approach will reveal and help bridge the gaps in your strategy.

It’s not possible to get ahead of every potential gap in your marketing, so instead aim to identify any significant differences between your customer’s expectations and your marketing activities. Start by surveying your customers directly to understand how they view your brand and messaging, adjusting your approach to useful feedback. Another way to pinpoint a gap is assessing where audiences are shifting their attention online, whether a new app, social network, publication, etc. Attention isn’t a constant, so look at broad trends in consumer behavior and specific trends related to your customer base, industry, and competitors. Ideally, you’ll be able to see what untapped channels, tactics, and formats you should consider addressing.

An easy hack is to create an Annual Customer Survey to validate both market & product strategy. 1. How did you first hear about our company? This can help assess the effectiveness of your marketing channels. 2. What do you like most about our service? What could be improved? 3. Describe your experience with our purchasing process. 4. What are your challenges, and how can we better address them? 5. How do you prefer to receive information from us (email, social media, newsletters)? Are there any communication channels we should use more effectively? 6. If customers leave, ask them why they chose to stop using your product. This helps you gather feedback from your target audience itself and align your marketing strategy as needed.

The gap analysis should be data-driven, and only when you know what's working can you truly identify the marketing gap. There are 3 metrics to measure, and once they are measured, it's easier to identify what's not working. Metric 1-Awareness: The easiest measure for Awareness is website traffic. Most industries need 500+ visitors to get 1-5 clients. Metric 2-Leads (B2B) or Buying Action (B2C): What % of the website visitors take a buying action and/or become a lead? Anything below 1% is not great. Anything above 2% is good. Metric 3-Sales Conversion: What % of the Leads purchase? By tracking these 3 metrics, you can identify which area is not working and improve from there.

Conducting regular SWOT analyses and mapping consumer behavior, trends, and journeys are essential for understanding market dynamics and staying attuned to evolving consumer needs. This continuous process enables organizations to proactively address gaps and adapt their offerings to better meet customer expectations.

When you think of gaps, you likely see areas missing from the overall view of an area you're assessing. In marketing, we think of marketing gaps as areas the brand is not showing up for their target audiences. So where does your target audience interact with your brand, your industry, and key competitors? Analyze these areas and identify gaps, then build strategies to bridge out your content marketing strategy to encompass these gaps; update KPIs too. Review and update your personas with current data on your brand's persona online behaviors, including their daily/weekly social media platforms, media channels, and industry websites. Be sure to also look closely at the persona's out-of-home and offline behaviors (think print, mail).

Once the gaps are identified, it's time to prioritize. Use tools like the Eisenhower matrix or RICE framework to pinpoint the most critical gaps. Then, create a clear, actionable plan—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Evaluated, and Revised. Allocate resources and assign tasks.

Prioritizing and building the priorities in the daily tasks of all teams working on it, reflecting back often and learning & shifting is the best technique I came across. This is making sure we are all doing the right things, not just doing things right. Always ask how is this spend, this brainstorming, this meeting contributing to enhancing impact of my priorities? Priorities must get top down support and enablement for the biggest impact, otherwise it ends up being just marketing initiative not linked to the rest of the organization and weakens the impact.

Marketing Actions are split between: - Ongoing strategies - baseline activity that is always-on and does not have an end date. - Strategic projects - the business has identified an opportunity that marketing can leverage. Your selection of actions should be based on your overarching Sales Strategy and aims to deliver activity reverse-engineers from those targets. If your Sales Strategy needs a set number of leads per month, what are the activities that will deliver this. Measure. Optimise. Evaluate.

To pinpoint and address gaps in your marketing strategy, prioritize your marketing actions based on their potential impact on your goals. Start by identifying the most critical areas where improvements can lead to significant gains, such as increasing engagement, boosting conversions, or enhancing customer satisfaction. Focus on actions that directly address these areas—whether it’s refining your messaging, optimizing your digital campaigns, or improving your customer service processes. Use data to guide your decisions, looking at which initiatives drive the most value and which are underperforming. This approach not only helps you identify where the gaps are but also ensures you're allocating resources in a way that maximizes results.

Now, it's time to put your plan into motion. Use project management tools, analytics, and dashboards to monitor your progress. Keep the lines of communication open and be open to feedback and suggestions from everyone involved. Regularly assess their effectiveness and be ready to pivot as needed. Employ surveys, interviews, tests, and audits to gather insights. Compare the results with your goals and expectations. Identify what works best, learn from your experiences, and fine-tune your marketing strategy for peak performance.

If you are implementing a new marketing strategy or making major changes, don't expect marketing progress to happen at the same speed in Q1 as you do in Q4. Give yourself a little breathing room since progress is likely to be a little slow at the beginning. And you don't want to panic and do something rash trying to catch up to some arbitrary numbers. Be patient with change. It won't happen all at once.

To identify gaps in your marketing strategy: Data Analysis: Regularly review metrics and KPIs for underperformance. Customer Feedback: Use surveys and social media to understand unmet needs. Competitive Analysis: Compare your strategy with competitors to spot missed opportunities. Market Trends: Stay informed about emerging trends and channels. Internal Review: Check for resource or skill shortages in your team. Consistently evaluating these areas helps uncover and address deficiencies, ensuring your marketing strategy remains effective and adaptive to market changes.

One thing I've found helpful in pinpointing gaps is to consider a cross-functional internal resource. In a corporate marketing environment, we often need to remember that we have allies with a vested interest in company business that may have different experiences or priorities than those of us in sales or marketing. They may have insight that has yet to be considered that could easily impact your 4Ps and beyond. In bringing them into the conversation, you not only gain insight but a future ally for you or your team.

I believe one way to pinpoint gaps in a marketing strategy is to begin by making sure the strategy aligns with your company’s go-to-market implementation plan. If the goal of your marketing strategy is sales growth, for example, have you specifically zeroed in on the type of sales growth you want to accomplish? There are many ways to achieve sales growth. Here are some key considerations to help narrow down how you seek to increase revenue and gain market share: Is your goal customer acquisition Is your goal market penetration Is your goal market expansion Is your goal cross-selling and upselling Is your goal digital and e-commerce Is your goal brand building Is your goal product development If your goal diversification

Start with analysing how well your marketing team and stakeholders understand the purpose of marketing strategy. One of my favourite exercises to give is The Golden Circle by Simon Sinek, that has three simple questions: - WHAT are we doing? - HOW are we doing it? - WHY are we doing it? This will show all the possible gaps in your teams' thinking, and will help you to work towards mutual strategy.