In today’s demanding business environment, local media company executives need to make well-informed decisions when evaluating how to reduce costs, align resources, and identify potential revenue streams. This means new tools and approaches are necessary to be sure the organization is getting the highest return on limited sales, marketing, and product development resources.
One cannot justify investments in activities solely because they are consistent with the mission. Activities must be consistent with strategic priorities, which will and should be narrower than the mission. This close alignment is especially critical as resources become scarce and not everything conceived as legitimate under the mission can be achieved.
For newspaper companies to continue to reach, and retain, the ever-escalating online audience -- both advertisers and consumers -- it is imperative to differentiate online offerings from the core print product and to benchmark constantly against the market and the competition.
We all want to be customer-centric. We all want to offer the products and services that our customers are yearning for. And although we may wish to think otherwise, there are those customers, those detractors, who are unsatisfied with a company's products or services. How then to turn these dissatisfied customers into highly-satisfied ones?
Although most companies would like to be able to serve everyone in their marketplace, unlimited resources would be necessary to do just that. This means new tools and strategies are essential to be able to identify high-priority customers and tailor what to say and sell to them.
At Kannon, we find again and again that organizations generally only act on what they can quantify, so it's important that companies measure their own performance. Without a consistent way to track performance, you never really know how well you're doing, if your resources are in the right place, or if you're even focusing on the right priorities.