Your moment of digital marketing truth

It’s time to cast a critical eye over your activities in four key strategy areas, to make sure you’re set up for sustainable success.

Hands up if you’ve heard the phrase “the world has changed” too many times lately for it to mean anything any more. Yep, same. The world is always changing. It’s not the change itself that’s remarkable, it’s the speed of change lately that’s shaken everything up. Consumers have formed and moved on from one preference to another, acquiring skills and forming opinions super-rapidly in challenging times. Innovative technology, apps and platforms have been hurled into the uncharted waters of this urgent demand. As marketers, we’ve all acted and reacted to deliver the best digital experiences we could lay our hands on.

But with the best will in the world, not every decision has been a good or sustainable one. Chances are, your digital marketing has taken some big leaps forward to meet short-term opportunities, but there will have been some misses as well as hits. As consumers begin to resume more recognisably normal lives, now’s the time to regroup.

We’re now working with many clients to take stock of current reality and to help them sense-check and develop their marketing and customer experience strategy for what lies ahead. If you’re ready to do the same, here are the four key strategy areas we recommend you focus on, to maintain and grow your market share by providing valued customer experiences that capture the zeitgeist.

KPIs

Take a good look at your KPIs and consider how you’re identifying success in your channels and marketing mix. Is everything connected or are people creating campaigns in silos, to meet conflicting or separate targets? You need a coherent strategy that embraces all your channels and customer requirements.

Messaging

How much is your messaging driven by a direct understanding of customer needs, as revealed by behavioural, demographic and research data? If you’ve been heavy on batch and push messaging to cover all the bases in a volatile market, it’s time to make a change to a more targeted, responsive and segmented approach.

Customer journeys

From acquisition and engagement to lapsed customers and off-boarding, you need journeys that address every life stage for your brand. We recommend developing a roadmap for each customer journey, working from identified customer requirements to define the technology, data structures and skills you need to create and deliver the right experiences.

Contact strategy

Take a look at how you’re using channels and your range of content. Make sure you’re engaging with customers at each stage of their journeys on key dates and at key points, providing relevant, personalised experiences, across all channels they engage with, when they engage with them.

Resetting your strategy now is vital: just look around at what competitors are doing. Everyone’s sharpening up their act, but budgets are tighter for most brands and businesses. Taking risks is not high on the boardroom agenda in a period of economic uncertainty. But ROI and growth are still top of the agenda, as markets emerge from survival mode and leaders adopt a competitive approach to recovery.

Digital marketers need to use assets and resources as effectively as they can. There’s a great opportunity in a more digital-first consumer market, but everyone is chasing their share of it. Trying to get back on track by resuming your pre-2020 plans won’t work. That’s why a strategy review is key – to make sure your next tranche of digital marketing campaigns and tactics are well-conceived and executed, to meet current customer needs in these interesting times.

If you’d like to move quickly and decisively with a strategy review and update, our customer engagement strategy and consulting team is here to help. We have 25+ years’ experience working with leading consumer marketing brands. We know the markets, the data, the tools and the tech – we can help you recalibrate with confidence and make changes rapidly and effectively to level up your customer experiences.