How can you prepare for the future of marketing strategy?

Yes! You need to know where you are before you can map out the best route to your destination. This means taking a hard look at your current tactics, tools, and results. Are your campaigns hitting their targets? Is your messaging resonating with your audience? Are you leveraging the right tools to reach your goals? For instance, let's say you've been heavily investing in email marketing, but your open rates and click-through rates are declining. This might be a sign that it's time to reassess and consider other channels or tactics. After all, the first step towards a successful future strategy is understanding your present. It's about knowing where you stand, so you can make informed decisions on where to go next.

Yes, analyzing your strategy is very important, knowing that market evolve over time and for you to flow along with market changes, you need to critically look at your strategies and judiciously follow those changes to align your decisions to suit your customers. Else, you will remain uncompetitive in the market.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding where you stand is paramount. Enter: the SWOT analysis. Strengths: Recognizing your strengths isn't just about patting yourself on the back. It's about capitalizing on what you do best. Are your email campaigns yielding an impressive open rate? That's a strength. Lean into it. Weaknesses: Identifying weaknesses isn't an admission of failure; it's an opportunity for growth. Opportunities: Maybe there's a social media platform you haven't ventured into or AI tool. Seize these opportunities. Threats: In the digital realm, threats can emerge from anywhere - algorithm changes, emerging competitors, or shifts in consumer behavior. Identify them early.

Think of marketing strategy like building a house. Before you lay the foundation for that dream mansion, you have to check the ground, right? That's where assessing your current situation comes in. It's like taking a good, honest look at your marketing tools. - What are we good at? - Where do we need work? - What exciting possibilities are out there? - What could trip us up? Once you've got a clear picture of your marketing landscape, you can start building your future-proof house.

Success tomorrow begins with understanding today. Conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis of your current marketing strategy. Unearth your strengths, acknowledge weaknesses, pinpoint opportunities, and recognize potential threats. Measure your performance against industry benchmarks, identify gaps, and lay the foundation for strategic enhancements.

Don't forget to talk to people - like your customers. Staying behind your desk and depending on technology and news articles to think for you is useless. If you're the CMO - go spend time in the sales department and talk with your company's reps. The boots on the ground will give you, sometimes, more relevant information than anyone else.

No one can really prepare for the future of marketing, since no one really knows what it is. All you can do is broaden your skills and watch what's happening around you so you can pivot in any direction.

In addition to scanning the external environment, it's crucial to focus on customer behavior and preferences. Conduct market research, analyze customer data, and invest in customer relationship management (CRM) systems to understand your audience better. Additionally, stay updated on technological advancements, especially in artificial intelligence and data analytics, as they can provide valuable insights into customer interactions.

The winds of change blow from external factors. Embrace tools like PESTEL analysis, scenario planning, and trend analysis to scan the external environment. Keep a watchful eye on social, technological, economic, environmental, and political trends. Spot signals of change, seize emerging opportunities, and prepare for potential threats. In the ever-evolving marketing landscape, adaptability is the key to resilience.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” – Albert Einstein. I love this quote and think of it within marketing especially. Just because you have always done something, doesn't mean it's always going to work or work well. To continue to grow and develop, you need to be aware of what's happening, how the market is changing and how you are adapting to change. Depending on the market you are in this rate of change and pace can change dramatically - it's always good to adapt and learn quickly.

Consumer-centricity is a critical element to scalability, but it has to be authentic and embraced across the organization. Go beyond platitudes and the superficial - and make sure all stakeholders across your organization are aligned and on board.

Unlock the secrets of consumer desire and let customer-centricity be your guiding light. Venture into the depths of segmentation, where demographics, psychographics, and behavior converge. Forge buyer personas with a master's touch, capturing the essence of your ideal customers. Chart a course through preferences, pain points, motivations, and desires, steering your ship with data-driven precision.

To remain informed about your audience's evolving needs and preferences, segmentation and buyer personas are essential tools for defining your target audience. Utilize social media listening tools and online surveys to gather real-time feedback. Moreover, consider the customer journey comprehensively. Understand the various touchpoints a customer has with your brand, both online and offline. Analyze their interactions at each journey stage to identify potential areas for improvement and personalized interventions.

Challenging the sole use of this method, dynamism and agility in understanding customers has taken its place. The future of marketing lies in balancing this traditional and structured approach with a more agile, real-time approach. This means not only relying on historical data and established personas but also being open to the dynamic nature of consumer identities and preferences. Real-time data analytics, AI-driven insights, and continuous engagement can provide a more nuanced and current view of audiences. In essence, while it's crucial to have a well-defined target audience, it's equally important to remain flexible and responsive to the true nature of todays consumer- which embodies fluidity and multifaceted Identity

1 product may have 10 different target audience. Thus, 1 product (may have) = 10 marketing funnels... This cannot be stressed enough. A funnel is not built around the product. It is a built around a realization of: How to make this specific target audience, buy this product

Value varies depending on your ICPs. Have a general statement, yes, but don't just apply that to everyone. Make it personal and direct.

If your target market doesn't see value in what you offer, neither will you. Warm French fries sell themselves. But not much else. So know your value proposition before you develop and sell the product. If you try to retcon it later, you won't have much luck. It'll ring hollow.

It's essential to spend some time identifying which platforms have the highest concentration of your audience and are most likely to help you achieve your goals. You then may want to prioritize them based on your business type, your audience and your available resources. Don't be afraid to pivot if a channel is underperforming, or focus more energy on it if its yielding results.

Recently our team is relying on benchmarking and audience data tools to find out where our audience is spending the most time. We've seen major migration across tools with big shifts in channel performance. However, inbound sales and lead generation through organic SEO and social continue to be strong performers for long term brand value. Ads prove to play a role in scaling and retention for customers.

To achieve the biggest impact from your marketing efforts - you need to meet your customers where they are at! It's worth trialling current and new marketing channels to determine what works best. It's easy to assume what you are already doing works best, or a particular platform won't work - but if you don't try it, you'll never know. Try new things, test your results, and adapt your strategy to double down on what works to maximise your efforts.

Digital marketing has come a long way from the days of 'pray and spray'. Today it's all about data-driven insights. By collecting and analyzing data, we get a deep understanding of our audience's needs and wants. This allows us to create targeted marketing campaigns that are much more likely to be successful. Monitoring and measuring go beyond mere numbers; they provide us with invaluable insights into what resonates, what falls flat, and where opportunities lie. Analytics ensures that our strategies are not just effective but also efficient. Embrace the power of data. Let it challenge your assumptions, inspire your creativity, and guide your strategic decisions.

Use tools and platforms to gather data, and info and measure it. When measures show that your return on investment (ROI) is staying the same or going down, or when the company's growth goal changes, it's time to find the goals that will help you grow again. Your goals for growth need to be very clear. It's not enough to have a goal; you also need ideas for how to get there. SMART goals are something to follow (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). It's important to set a clear, measurable goal for your business as part of your marketing strategy. Then, state, understand, and agree on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure how well the goals are being met over time.

Monitoring and measuring your results is the only way to determine if your marketing efforts are yielding the returns you want. With so many measurement tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs or Meta, it's easy to set KPIs that can be benchmarked against over time. This also helps to identify rising opportunities and areas that may need tweaking to improve their results. Any additional information that you can gather to help inform your decision-making is worth having. This is especially important when it comes to spending on promoting your business.

Brands must recognise that marketing (internally) to employees is just as (if not more) important than marketing (externally) to target customers. Employees are a brand's most effective ambassadors because they are the ones who need to deliver on the brand promise and promote the brand. Customers would faster believe the words of those employees, than they would believe the messages from a company's official marketing channels. If employees are not engaged and empowered to be brand advocates, it will be much harder to achieve your marketing objectives.

In truth, Marketing success is about understanding psychology and behavioural science. Marketing impacts what people think and feel which in turn impacts behaviour. To truly stay ahead of the game, stay on top of new thinking, discoveries and theories in psychology and behavioural science and look at building your marketing strategy in line with those.

Communicate Internally Depending on the size and structure of your organization, different departments working in silos, with no cross-communication, may sometimes lead to disjointed campaigns that can confuse your audience, dilute your brand’s message and hinder results. Imagine your social media team promoting one message while your email marketing team pushes another, and in-app promo pushes yet another–that’s not efficient. Establish cross-departmental collaboration and communication by bringing all relevant teams together to align messaging and branding across all channels. Ensuring all your marketing efforts work harmoniously together will increase the impact of your message and help your marketing dollars go even further.

We’ve entered an Age of Emotion. We’re prioritizing our time, our relationships, and even where we work differently. Our guard is up and we’re less likely to be “sold” to. We’re pressing “skip ads” as fast as possible. Brand Leaders should understand their audience deeply - how they want to feel and their unmet needs. Brand Leaders can’t just focus on “What’s your why?” in the absence of “Who’s your who?”. If they do, it won’t be a complete insight-informed brand strategy and marketing won’t be as relevant or compelling. If you want to capture people’s attention and spark brand desire, never stop understanding “Who’s your who?.”

Minor shifts to digital marketing campaigns can have a big impact. Be clear and methodical about changes, rather than reactively changing a whole campaign. Also, digital channels can take time to optimize, especially when Machine Learning is involved. If a new campaign isn't performing right away, give it some time and monitor the data trends closely before reassessing.