For marketers, life used to be easier. Reaching out to consumers was easy, once you were able to craft a compelling message, you could move the product. Only a few TV channels, a handful of magazines, a newspaper or two and some radio stations in each market to handle.
Now technology has made it a whole lot tougher. We’ve got a plethora of TV channels, thousands of web sites and hundreds of “Apps” and so on. All these require us to build immersive experiences that engage consumers. You have to assimilate a whole new range of skills and capabilities.
It would be worthwhile to keep the below in mind.
Identify Business Objectives
Everyone is struggling to keep up in today’s marketing arena. One the other hand, marketing professionals feel the pressure to actively integrate emerging trends into their marketing strategy. In addition, there is a tendency for marketers to create a “one size fits all” approach for a portfolio of brands or on the other extreme, a want to create complicated models to formulate marketing objectives.
But the mark of a good marketing strategy is not how many gadgets and platforms are figured into it, but how effectively it achieves its goals. Most businesses can be adequately served by evaluating just three metrics: awareness, sales and advocacy. Every business needs all three, but it is important to focus on one primary objective or your strategy will rapidly disintegrate.
To Identify, Evaluate and Activate Emerging Opportunities
Marketing executives are busy with actively monitoring the marketplace, identifying opportunities, collaborating with production etc all while executing promotional strategies. It is unreasonable to expect them to be aware of emerging technology and tactics.
Therefore, it is advisable to have a team dedicated to identifying emerging opportunities, and evaluate their true potential. Sure, some of these will fail, but a few winners will more than make up for the losers. Once an emerging opportunity has been tested successfully, it can then be scaled up and integrated with normal operations.
Separating Strategy and Innovation
Often strategy and innovation are grouped together as they are both perceived as “smart” things. Consequently, firms tend to put their best people on innovation, those who have shown a knack for getting results. That’s why, innovation teams are crammed with senior executives who also tend to have ample resources at their disposal. All set up to succeed. Failure? not an option.
The truth is that innovation is a messy business. It focuses on creating something completely new and unfortunately, new things tend to not work as well as standard solutions. However, strategy is fundamentally different in that it achieves specific objectives. So failure has to be an option, but cheap. Keep committed resources to a minimum.
Be Pro-Active in the Marketplace
Marketing used to be about compelling advertising campaigns that would get the consumer’s attention and drive awareness. Once that was accomplished, direct sales and retail operations would close the deal.
Today, even effective promotional campaigns are likely to result in an Internet search, rather than lead to a purchase. Simply creating awareness and nothing else is more likely to enrich your competition who can track and then re-target your consumers.
Successful brands need to do more than just drive consumers to a purchase, they have to inspire them to participate.