The beauty of digital marketing is the instantaneous availability of metrics.
Are you updating your marketing efforts based on that quick feedback?
In this insightful clip from B2B Forum 2022, Paul Ince from LikeMind Media shares the importance of moving quickly, being flexible, and using data to course-correct your marketing.
Watch Paul’s clip or read the transcript below.
What we need is “marketing plasticity.”
So what is marketing plasticity?
There are three elements here that I feel are important for marketing plasticity. And the first one is really key to this. It’s all about speed. Because we’ve gotta play catch up to the way that society is changing before our very eyes. So, importantly, we’ve got to work quickly. As marketers, we’ve got to [make] quick decisions.
There’s no point in waiting, ‘cause we might have missed the boat.
And to help us along with that, we’re going to use some of those tools that we’ve become accustomed to in the pandemic. Things like Zoom and Teams and Slack, to help us communicate faster with each other: within the team, maybe [with] our client, maybe [with] our senior leadership.
And what we’re also going to do, is we’re going to give people responsibility to make decisions.
So this is about devolving some of that decision making capabilities to members of your team who are gonna be at the coalface, seeing what’s going on, and they’re gonna take those decisions. They’re gonna thank you for that.
It’s important to be flexible.
We need to be prepared to change. We have to be prepared to change because our audiences are changing and society is changing. We don’t have any control over that. We must be prepared to do it.
We are also, unfortunately, going to waste money, which is not really music to the ears of your execs, but that’s the reality of it. What we’re going to try and do however, is to prevent us from wasting a lot of money… by just wasting little bits and soften the blow.
If you think about it, you know, rather than having to pull a big, million-dollar campaign, if we only have to waste 50 grand, then that’s not so much of an impact.
In fact, your senior execs probably won’t even notice!
But that’s important and we’ll see why in a bit.
We’re going to use digital channels more because they allow us to be more flexible in the way that we can make those changes.
And then the third part is analysis.
None of this is about shooting from the hip, or guessing. This is about understanding the metrics that we look at. But we’re going to review them constantly and quickly. We are going to go directly to audiences and ask them questions so that we find out from our target audience what it is that they’re feeling and where they are right now. So we’re going to do a lot of listening.
And, again, your team will love this—we are not going to ask our team to justify absolutely everything that they do. Because we’re going to trust them to make the decisions, because that’s who we’re giving responsibility to.
Now why would we do that? I feel like we need some reasoning.
Going back to our series of rigid campaigns, goals, and targets: if society is moving away from what we projected… and we are going in this direction here—sticking to our plan—the gap between the end result is massive.
So what we need to do, is to break down objectives into really small pieces. And I’m not talking about quarters here. I’m thinking months and weeks. Very small incremental steps that we can go, yes, done it. Good, next. Done it. Good. And we keep as close as possible because we want results.
This is not about anything other than trying to get the best results for us as marketers—remember—trying to justify our existence!
So if we do veer off, it helps us get back to where we need to be.
We’re also going to refresh the research that we do. So we’re going to pay particular attention to any piece of research that we come across about our audience or our target market. We’re going to make sure that it is bang! up-to-date.
We’re going to see whether or not there’s anything in there that would put that research at risk of being outdated. Either because of when it was [created], or the definition of the scenario perhaps.
I’m not saying don’t use old research. I’m just saying analyze research to ask further questions, to check its relevancy. Because again, we want to justify the decisions that we make. (Although I’ve just said don’t justify, but you know what I mean.)
Published 6/28/23
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