Innovative Strategies for Modern Marketing Success
July 8, 2021By Jay Kulkarni
Shifts in marketing needs have created an evolution across marketing teams and in the marketing services industry. Many orgs require assistance in understanding and implementing these strategies in a way that will ensure business growth and prosperity.
As we rush full-speed into the golden age of automation, marketing teams must utilize a combination of technology, data and insights, audience definition and acquisition, operational efficiency, best practices, and — of course — automation strategies to ensure success and scalability.
“At a time when brands are also navigating many digital marketing challenges, they cannot afford to sacrifice on revenue because of internal knowledge gaps or team time constraints,” says Henry Rowe, president and chief strategy officer at Theorem. “Simply put, the future can no longer afford to be siloed.”
Agile marketing team and services organizations have pivoted to a model that allows them to understand how these marketing elements stand alone and feed into one another. In addition, these groups are enabling the creation and implementation of marketing strategies that meet the needs of changing customer demand, while ensuring successful longevity. But what are the main factors that create overall modern marketing success?
Strategy
While many focus on technology and platforms as the heart of their marketing success, it is actually strategy that takes center stage. The most important part of ensuring modern marketing success and scalability is building a marketing strategy around your current and future business needs.
Creating a well-rounded strategy involves the inclusion of many parts of your organization to perform an in-depth look at your current business needs and goals as well as the aspirational needs and goals of the business. Doing so will allow teams to fully understand what the strategy must entail for short- and long-term marketing success.
Many brands have their strategy sorted; what they want and appreciate is flexible expertise that is as deep as it is effective, taking existing business strategies and turning them into actionable digital campaigns.
In addition to the creation of the strategy is the implementation, a task that must be approached with a flexible mindset. The demands of the consumer market are rapidly changing and only those who create a flexible strategy will be able to pivot quickly to meet those demands.
Technology
Secondary to strategy, technology is a vital part of ensuring marketing success in the modern landscape. It is important to develop a martech strategy that is both right for your current business and will allow your business to easily scale. This includes technology that will automate processes, creating efficiency, reducing error rates and increasing ROI in the long term. Developing an agile tech stack will allow for growth of your organization and ensure marketing success in the current landscape and for years to come.
Data and Insights
More than ever before, data and insights are the key to a successful marketing strategy.
While the days of the third-party cookie are on the way out in terms of data collection, the first-party cookie will continue to reign supreme. Many organizations have adopted new methodologies for collecting first-party data to better understand their ideal consumers. In addition, there are a rising number of companies that are evolving out of an "MQL, SQL" funnel strategy and adopting a smaller, more qualified marketing target strategy to bolster their pipeline with more qualified potential buyers and increased close rates.
These new targeting methodologies and fluid data collection strategies are restructuring the path to modern marketing success. While the underlying tactics in terms of data analysis, audience segmentation and targeted messaging based upon consumer intelligence have remained the backbone of digital marketing, the formula for their specific usage has changed to suit the demands of the modern customer.
Operational Efficiency
There are many factors to consider when working to achieve operational efficiency. Many sectors within your organization will need to be aligned and optimized in order to achieve operational success. Some of the most imperative alignments being the alignment of sales and marketing teams as well as marketing and tech teams.
Evolution in the marketing landscape has created the need for unification of teams across organizations in terms of goals, KPIs and ROI. The bottom line here is that ensuring modern marketing success means creating optimized workflows and collaboration across the teams within your organization.
The Future is Flexible
Continual shifts in marketing demand have created evolution in the marketing landscape. Modern marketing success hinges on agility of internal marketing teams and or the marketing service orgs they partner with.
Organizations with the ability to create flexible strategies, blueprint and implement agile MarTech, dynamically collect and utilize data and continually optimize organizational efficiency are sure to continually succeed when it comes to their digital marketing endeavors.
Jay Kulkarni is founder and CEO of Theorem Inc.
The views and opinions expressed in Marketing Maestros are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.