New year, new view?
For over 4,000 years, when the Babylonians are said to have recorded the first New Year's resolutions, the start of a new calendar year has been associated with change for the better and positive transformation. While the education sector is midway through its academic year, the new year provides a perfect opportunity to take stock of your general performance or investigate a specific problem while there is still time to influence areas such as student recruitment, income generation, profile raising etc. Obtaining a fresh perspective from someone independent to your organisation can help you pinpoint, then develop innovative solutions to tackle key issues and leverage opportunities to build on known and previously unidentified strengths.
Benefits of a review of your marketing/communications department or its activities include:
Objectivity: Offers impartial, rigorous advice that can take a step back (when needed) from history, internal politics and personal relationships.
Added value: Capitalises on the consultant's breadth of experience to benchmark and learn from your activities, performance, capability and capacity.
Persuasive: Generates evidence which makes your in-house benefits and strengths more tangible, while highlighting risks and weaknesses which may support arguments for additional or alternative resources.
Strategic: Enables you to review and clarify objectives and/or KPIs, increasing the likelihood of success and improving future measurement and performance monitoring.
Motivates: Facilitates a more dynamic, enriched and focused review, securing greater buy-in through engagement, while accessing intuitive and tacit knowledge within your team.
Justifies: Analyses return on investment (ROI) and value for money (VFM), providing a rationale for oft perceived "inflated" marketing budgets, which can sometimes be forgotten in political wrangling during the annual planning round.
Assurance: Demonstrates to senior leadership that you are doing the best you can to remain responsive and be alert to new business opportunities: inviting constructive criticism to avoid the dangers of insular thinking and using competitors/best practice as a yard stick against which performance can be compared.
Discover out more about Kathryn's marketing review service