By M. Isi Eromosele

Marketers face the significant decision of where to position their marketing assets in order to drive profitable sales. The solution is to create a brand experience blueprint, an aggregation of all potential customer interactions across the current components of the company’s marketing mix and customer touch points.

It is a compilation of all the opportunities the company has to communicate with and engage its customers. Thinking horizontally across the entire brand experience, the company can then identify those areas where marketing investments make business sense. It is imperative that marketers only invest in those campaigns and initiatives that drive sales for the company.

Outsourcing strategy to an advertising agency, continuing to support investments in marketing events or paying for sponsorships that have no relationship to sales are three instances of investments that could be potentially wasteful. Marketers need to apply an analytical approach to better understanding what drives sales and what doesn’t.

Marketing is closely connected to the largely dynamic business marketplace. This means what was effective this year might not be so next year. This constant makes the discipline of marketing terrifically thrilling.

Marketers have to be able to discern which investments pay out and which ones don’t. Additionally, they need to be able to rank-order marketing mix investments to reveal which ones perform better than others. When proposing marketing investments, managers need create a financial profile of their proposed investments, with specific indication of where they expect to make cash outflows and how much sales inflows is expected.

In making the decision of where to invest its marketing dollars, the company could use the previously created brand experience blueprint as its portfolio, since it adequately lays out all of the current customer interaction points in such a way that communicate the brand’s benefits. Questions that should be asked include:

• What handles should be pulled to activate the brand?
• Where should the company invest its marketing dollars?
• Should differentiation of offerings be based on geography or targeted market segment?

To drive profitable sales, certain steps must be taken by marketers before marketing investment can be implemented:

• Ensure alignment with the business strategy that the marketing supports
• Identify where the brand experience blueprint helps to create a marketing investment program
• Implement a process for evaluating the progress and ROI of all marketing investments.

A critical part of any marketing investment is to plan for what would happen. Equally as important is the necessity to measure the results of what is happening and learn from it.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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