Chances are, especially given the current business environment, your marketing plan has changed, or it needs to change.

At the very highest level, your company’s marketing plan might be something like “Become the next Google” or “Be like X Company, but with better functionality.” But how does that translate to your day-to-day marketing efforts? How can you help your sales team position your company to align with its high-level marketing plan?

Surveys and the five P’s of marketing
Every marketing plan has these essential elements: product, price, place, promotion, and people. A SimplyDIRECT survey can help to inform all of the elements of your plan. Our surveys get to the heart of what makes your target audience – the people – tick: their goals, needs, interests and more.

By surveying your target audience, you can learn whether your product is meeting the current and future needs of your customers and prospects. What are their challenges? What features do they really want?

You can also discern how much people are willing to pay when you ask a question such as “What’s important to consider when funding new technology?” Answer choices might be “revenue generation,” “cost savings,” “efficiency improvements,” or any other factor that you can put a price tag on.

What demographic (the place) will appreciate your company’s offering? Do you need to change anything about your offering to align with regional or global audiences? These are also questions that can also be determined with a survey.

Finally, we get to promotion. Do you really need to sponsor a drinking tent at a golf tournament, or having a NASCAR driver speak on camera about your offering? Do you need pretty posters in airports and or a famous blogger to crow about you? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, adding a SimplyDIRECT survey to your marketing efforts is another way to promote your company. Survey responders are going to remember the incentive you offered as a reward for taking the survey.

Surveys as your secret weapon
While the sales team wines and dines the CIO, you can use a survey to find out who are the influencers that experienced the pain, reported the need, and identified your firm’s solution as one to be considered. Knowledge gleaned from a SImplyDIRECT survey is powerful. It can inform the day-to-day tactical efforts that support the high-level plan.

When the marketing plan is executed against a foundation of knowledge about market needs and customer satisfaction, the role of marketing is seen as a strategic asset to the organization.

See for yourself how you can use a SimplyDIRECT survey as a secret weapon.