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As the world is changing a mile a minute, and it’s hard to scale, differentiate yourself, and maintain trust in the ever-changing marketing world. The more you can plan ahead for your marketing strategy, the better equipped you feel to manage those changes when they happen.
So, what are the plans for next year? Besides dieting, exercising and keeping in touch with the family more often, marketers also need to start thinking about how they will allocate their budget in 2019. Here are some helpful options for what you could do next year for your marketing efforts, along with some of the benefits and pitfalls of each approach.
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If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Stick with what worked last year. No need to re-invent the wheel entirely if you can identify some successes of your 2018 efforts. If your marketing’s performance is satisfying the business and operations are running smoothly, why rock the boat? This will save you on time, budget and effort.
This said, be sure you are maximizing your brand’s potential. Don’t get too comfortable – it’s important to still take risks. The takeaway here is to pull out a few things that worked well from your past marketing strategy, do them again, and improve and innovate with the rest.
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Optimize it.
Meaning, do what you did last year, but do it better. Measure, test, learn and optimize across all platforms and campaigns. You and your team will become experts in data wrangling, developing intricate Excel spreadsheets and talking about probability distributions over lunch. This will make you an expert in data analytics and will be a healthy mix of challenging and bonding time for your team.
Keep in mind this can’t be your only approach to a marketing strategy. Marketers tend to be too conservative with their experiments to genuinely change their brand’s digital customer journey. So, while optimizers often get a short-term boost, performance figures often revert to the previous ones.
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Tear it up and start fresh.
I know. We just said above to pull what worked from last year. But what if not much really worked? It’s awfully tempting to think that the best way forward is to continue on as before, but sometimes taking an entirely different approach in a marketing strategy is what makes the real progress.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Who is your target customer?
- How do they buy from you?
- How can you make that process easier?
- How can you find more people like them?
Understanding how your customers communicate is essential. Customers expect that companies will communicate with them in the ways they like. That’s why it’s so important for marketers to be aware of their customers’ communication preferences.
Learn Your Customers
This exercise has the ability to produce game-changing results and motivate your team. The most challenge part of this exercise is getting buy-in. Most organizations expect marketers to somehow know everything about a brand’s customers and their buying habits already, despite never having done first-hand research.
Is print material still part of marketing strategies in a digital work?
Yes, a lot has gone digital, but if you take the opportunity to do something that seems against the grain, it can work! Of course, let’s be smart about this one — don’t just do something only because it’s uncommon and not because it resonates with their audiences. Consider integrated campaigns and creative distribution tactics that focus on ways to engage audience members that their industry competitors might not be considering.
Planning for 2019? We Can Help!
These are just three points to consider as you think ahead to your 2019 marketing strategy. Remember, there’s not a single “right way” to build a marketing strategy, but these tips can help you achieve any marketing goal. Let Davant help you pair the perfect print materials with your marketing strategy! Send us a message, or give us a call at (317) 849-6565.
