Christo: Hey there! Welcome back to Basic Bananas TV! I want to share something with you: a pretty cool resource, a pretty cool tool actually, that you can use over and over and over again we call it the Marketing Health Check, and what it is, is a series of questions basically where you can score yourself. You can score your business, basically to see where the key areas are that you need to improve because working with thousands of businesses over the years, we’ve kind of boiled it down to a few key areas that we need to measure to keep an eye on when it comes to marketing to make sure everything’s going to be working together because it’s no good having like a really good – let’s say like lead generation strategy if it’s not converting to like a phone call. You’re like for example, let’s say you’re really good at social media or good at Instagram and that makes people visit your website. If your website doesn’t convert people to an inquiry or a purchase or a booking you know, to take that next step, then it doesn’t matter how good you are on Instagram. You’re not going to convert to sales, or you might have a great converting website but you don’t have the traffic generation, or you get the inquiry from the website but you haven’t got the sales process and you haven’t got the nurture sequence, the nurture funnels in place to make sure that people choose you whether they’re going to move towards a purchase now, or in six months time you need to have these kinds of relationship-building strategies and funnels in place to make sure you get a return from whatever got their attention in the first place like the social media as an example or whatever marketing kind of top of funnel strategy it was that got their attention. So we call it the Marketing Health Check and what I recommend to do with this resource is to do it every quarter so you review your marketing basically you set a quarterly plan you do the Marketing Health Check and you could be as practical as do this Marketing Health Check, you’ll see the areas where you have lower scores where you’re not kind of doing so well and then come up with a plan or just come up with like three ideas to try and move that score up in the areas where you’re lowest each quarter, so you just look it over rerun the test we do it the same in our own businesses and a lot of businesses we work with you basically run through the scores and it’s a good way to kind of get that overview of you know where are we doing well or where are we doing not so well in terms of our marketing. So the questions on there if you’re watching this you could also go just simply go to basicbananas.com/healthcheck so it’ll be yeah health check, health just spell regular like a health check and c-h-e-c-k and health h-e-a-l-t-h just spelt regularly no gaps or anything marketing basicbananas.com/healthcheck and you’ll see these questions to run through I’ll give you a quick overview and basically the way it works is so the first area planning and measuring we have a strategic marketing plan in place with clear goals and KPIs with you know so we have basically clear directions so we don’t waste our resources and then you score yourself one is like not at all or 10 is we’re excellent really strong in this area you score yourself basically. So it’ll only take like two minutes basically to complete this and give you a really good snapshot overview. The second question we track our marketing effectiveness and so we have certainty on which marketing strategies are working for us and which ones don’t do you have are you tracking all of your different marketing strategies because and the reason this is so important as you do more and more and more marketing, as you grow your business, you need to be able to keep an eye on things even though you’re not doing them. All you know at the end of the week you should be able to look over things in a matter of a few minutes and see how you’re rating. And if an area, is down, you know, in terms of marketing you’re not tracking, you’re not, you know, generating a positive return, you want to be able to adjust things, tweak it, change it or scrap it of course the second, or the next, third question is we have a clearly defined vision and values for your business but obviously, you basically want a really clear purpose for the business so that you know, and your team know, and your suppliers know, and your customers know everything you’re doing is to achieve this kind of one big purpose statement and that’ll allow you, your team, everything in terms of marketing strategies you just know if something you’re doing moves you closer to that purpose does it if it doesn’t don’t do it so that’s the third question. The fourth one is we know and understand our ideal customer so you need to know and understand your ideal customers on a deeper level not just their demographics like most people go into but also their frustrations and their desires. Marketing to attract new customers should appeal to their top wants or their top problems either the ones that you can deliver or problems that you can resolve you’ve got to get inside their head that’s what they’re what we market to in terms of branding we have a clear brand strategy so do you have a really, really, clear brand strategy and you know what you’re doing and you have things that you’re implementing intentionally to become the go-to brand in your industry clear on your differentiation you score yourself clear marketing strategies to help you avoid the kind of scattered and like unorganized approach, how do you rank. We have a well-oiled marketing machine that one in terms of you have like systems in place so that any lead you attract they’re looked after they’re nurtured you have to keep in mind we need a marketing machine in place basically like a database system with funnels and things which is actually into the next question so that if you attract a lead now but they don’t decide to buy for six months you’re going to basically own that decision making period so that they’ll choose you when they’re ready to purchase so ranking ourselves on that do you have a database with basically online marketing funnels set up you absolutely need that should be the backbone of your entire marketing strategy for your your business you need a database system with automation built-in, so every lead every contact, every opt-in, every customer every past customer, any prospective customer on any level, they’re all looked after provided the most value and you build and show your credibility with them and provide value so they’ll they’ll choose you. You need that system, you know, do you have it and how is it, how are your funnels how do you score yourself in terms of that automation, one to ten, and then, excuse me, the final question is you have a proven sales process what that means is do you have a structure for your sales. So it’s not just left to chance that you know you talk to someone on one day and you might be in a really good talkative mood with plenty of time and you do a really great job at sales, the next day you’re busy, your mind’s on something else and you don’t really say the same thing you know doesn’t come across the same way so we need a sales process. We do quite a few strategy sessions we do this kind of one-to-one private strategy sessions with some bigger businesses from time to time here at basic bananas and a very common strategy session I’ll do is a sales process so businesses a lot of businesses that sell really high-valued, high-priced items like from boats, to you know mining equipment, real estate –
a common one, where a big one sale can mean a lot. Now, they need a sales process because especially to~ in any size business you need a process because even if you think, oh you’re great when you’re on the phone, you’re excellent at it, what if you’re not there and someone else answers the phone? Is it just left to chance, you know, they need a structure and you, even yourself, need things that you know you’re working on so you can measure how you go to tweak and adjust the sales process not about having a script, it’s about having a framework that you work people through. Because especially you with bigger, higher-priced items, you know that it’s not~ we can’t just rush a sale it’s like people have to go through the process and some will move through the process quicker some will move through slower, but we need to kind of use the same framework and same process so we’re working through things and it doesn’t matter how many leads you’re attracting if you don’t have a sales process, you’re going to lose, you’re going to drop the ball at that point. So this is a key area in the makeup of our kind of marketing to sales health check so yeah grab the resource you can grab it on basicbananas.com/healthcheck I recommend you complete this, as I said every quarter. It only takes two minutes to get a quick check-in, see the key areas you need to be focusing on if you’re anything below a seven on any of the areas, I’ll be looking to improve those. Basically every quarter you could say, “let’s pick two areas where we’re below a seven, and let’s implement three new things we can do to move that number up to the kind of seven or above”. If you’ve got certain numbers where you’re hitting like an 8-9-10 consistently moving forward, well then you probably want to move the goalposts because maybe your scale of like okay we’re hitting a 10 pretty easily let’s make you know for a future quarter at that point you’d say what’s now a 10 we’ll make that a six so that we’re always improving and pushing things and then you’ll set you to know aim for new heights in those different areas to continually improve. So there we go, that’s the Marketing Health Check, it’s a wicked-like awesome, wicked-cool, wicked-amazing little tool to give you a quick overview, areas you need to focus on. Grab it on basicbananas.com/healthcheck Once you’ve completed that on there as well, if you’d like from the team at Basic Bananas, we can send you a soft copy because sometimes it’s nice if you’re doing this with team members to get them involved, print it off fill it in together come up with ideas to move you know the number up higher in the different areas as a team so that kind of everyone has more involvement, it’s a good way to go so we can send that through to you as well. Awesome! If you enjoyed this tip please go ahead and share it with anyone else in the business who you know would benefit from this or any of your team who you know would benefit from it could be husbands, wives friends, family, and any~if you know, love the content that we share please go ahead, click on Google and leave us a Google review, that’s what helps us, you know, reach more people. Check out the Basic Bananas podcast as well you can find it just about on any audio platform nowadays just search Basic Bananas, the podcast show will come up as well share a lot of valuable information on there. Yeah, if you leave any reviews you leave us as well we share them with all of our team it’s a lot of team behind the scenes here as well and they love to see you know the difference that all of the resources we share with the world make for you know, real people like you. So thanks again and we’ll see you on another episode soon. Bye for now!