How to be a head of marketing: The champion's checklist

Congratulations! You’ve got that new post as head of marketing!

You walk into your new offices – now what do you do? You need to find out all about your new employer’s strength and weaknesses, their products, positioning and existing marketing activities.

Here’s a marketing checklist to get you going:
 

Customers

• Who are our customers? Why do they buy from us? How many are repeat customers?
• How do we market to them? Do we have a newsletter, printed or emailed? How are they segmented (verticals, geographies)?
• Do we run a user group or customer forum? Do we ask them to golf/rugby/baseball days?
• How do new customers find us/hear about us? Where do new enquiries get put through to, sales or marketing? Do we record & track them?
• Is it possible to build a database of our prospect universe, to have the names of all possible potential purchasers on it?
• Do we have referral or affiliate programmes?

Marketing budget

• Do I have a budget, and if so, what is it?
• What is the sign-off process?
• What is included and what isn’t?

Products

• What are our USPs?
• How do they compare to our competitors’ USPs?
• How does our pricing work?

Subcontractors

• What marketing subcontractors do we use, such as PR company, digital agency, web site hosting and maintenance?
• Are they on a retainer and if so, how much is that and what is the termination notice? Nothing like calling a meeting with the new marketing manager to keep them on their toes for fear of losing the account.

Competition

• Do we know who our prospects buy from today? What would make them switch to us?
• What are our competitors’ pricing and USPs?
• What keywords are their web sites optimised for?

Collateral

• What brochures and other printed material do we have?
• Are they up to date?

Advertising

• What advertising do we do? What’s the budget? Can we measure the results?
• What PPC campaigns are we running? Do they have an end date? What’s the daily budget? What are the stats – cost per acquisition, cost per qualified lead, cost per sale?

Website

• Who hosts this? Who does the creative and HTML? Who updates it? Is it easy to update?
• What analytics do we use? What do the traffic stats look like?
• Is it optimised for mobile/responsive design?
• What is the uptime? If it goes down, how would we know – do we use any third party monitoring tools (like Pingdom)?

SEO

• Who does this, in-house or external? What keywords is the web site optimised for?
• Do we have monthly stats on keyword performance?
• When were the keywords last reviewed?

Databases

• What systems do we use – CRM system, emailing system, customer databases? Or just lots of spreadsheets? Are all the customers from the accounting system in the database?
• Who is responsible for data integrity?

Newsletters

• Who writes them? How often do we send them? Printed and/or email?
• For email: do we segment? Who do we use to send them and do we track opens, clicks and clean the database for unsubscribes and bounces?

Social

• Do we have a blog? Do we have LinkedIn and Facebook pages? Do we use Twitter and Google+? Corporate or personal accounts?
• Who is updating the content? Do we have individual accounts and/or corporate accounts?

PR

• In house or agency? Do we have a list of key publications we target and the names of key journalists?
• Do we have a clippings book?
• Do we have a standardised About paragraph?

Other campaigns

• What other marketing do we use or have used in the past?
• Direct Mail? Telemarketing? Exhibitions? Webinars? Radio & TV advertising? Sponsorship? Speaking opportunities? Affiliate or Referral Schemes? Pay-per-Lead?
• Any data on their costs and ROI?
• Did they work?
• Knowing what has failed in the past, and why, will help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Conclusion