Business Insights

Our Marketing 360 Assessment has found that there are three aspects of marketing that UK SME owners struggle with the most: marketing metrics, generating leads and executing marketing plans. In this post, we’ll focus on the second challenge: generating the right leads and closing them effectively. We recently spoke with Sophia Ahrel, a part-time Marketing Director with The Marketing Centre, to hear how she helped an ambitious fintech company to increase lead generation by understanding, measuring and optimising the customer journey.

Last year we launched our revamped Marketing 360 Assessment to give business leaders a quick and easy way to measure their marketing performance and prioritise areas to work on. Since then, over 500 UK business leaders have used the tool to get a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses - and one thing was abundantly clear from the data we’ve received. UK SME owners are struggling to measure and understand the ROI of their marketing activity. Marketing metrics scored lower than any of the other 12 categories in our assessment. Other common pain points included lead generation, executing marketing plans and enabling better sales team performance. However, it’s worth noting that these are self-assessments so the data represents people’s perceptions of their marketing and not necessarily an objective appraisal. In this post, we’re going to explore the data in more depth and share resources for any business owners that are struggling with marketing metrics, lead generation, executing marketing plans and more.