Construction Marketing: TWO: Marketing Communications Decision Matrix

Where Do You Need To Spend Your Time?

MARKETING IS MORE THEN A LIST OF THINGS TO DO. It’s a very carefully strategized group of messages, activities, programs and events that articulate a company’s position in terms of differentiation.

BASICALLY, YOU HAVE TO ASK THIS QUESTION? Why should a prospect want to do business with your company as opposed to the competition?

McKenzie’s Secrets of Construction Marketing #2

The marketing message is a very carefully strategized tactic. Strategy sets the direction, but it is the marketing message that communicates it in a variety of ways – both direct and indirect, because, marketing creates the environment for the sale to occur.

Marketing should be prioritized on an annual basis. One way to accomplish this is to use a system based approach. The purpose is to evaluate your current marketing program(what needs work now) relative to your companies corporate strategy, and also compared to what the competition emphasize in their marketing. This does not mean that you are going to copy your competition, but it does mean that you want to be aware of what they are doing so you can out flank them – to put it in military terms.

The systems approach uses a weighted decision matrix, meaning that some decision is more important than other decisions. There are three components:

Strategy
Needs Work
Competition

Strategy is weighted more heavily then Needs Work, and Needs Work is weighed more than Competition. Strategy. If the activity is important relative to accomplishing your corporate strategy, then is receives a score of a 10. If it is not important then it receives a low score of a 1. Or it is related somewhere in-between.

Needs Work: If the activity needs a lot of work regardless of how important it is in the overall strategy, rate it a 10, and a 1 if it doesn’t need work.

Competition: Does the competition use this activity in their marketing; if so and if you think it’s important value it high, if not give it a low 1 score. The consideration here is that you may find areas that you consider crucial to your strategic plan, that the competition doesn’t feel crucial, and hence this might be an area to exploit.

Below is a sample chart showed with the actual ranking and then sorted showing what needs work based upon the highest score. You can add and subtract from the list as your companies marketing matrix may be different.