For marketers, it’s fair to say that 2024 has brought about unprecedented business turbulence. Whether technological or economic, regulatory or behavioural, our need to be agile as marketers is more important than ever amongst the uncertainty and competitive pressure where so much is out of our control.
There’s a need to be flexible with your marketing strategy to navigate these changes. Read on for our six key tips to stay on top.
1. Pivoting budget
Pivoting your marketing budget could mean many things. It could mean your agency budget should be going on your UX before it goes on your Paid Ads. Or that one advertising platform is more relevant than another so you should streamline. It could mean you are investing in a part of the world that isn’t ready for your product or service, or it could simply mean you aren’t in a place to invest in digital.
Consider the following: is the creative the best it can be; have you done thorough market research or are you making assumptions about where the target audience is spending time online; does your business have the operational logistics to fulfil the action you’re trying to generate? Get the basics right before your budget is wasted in the wrong places.
2. Consider the long and short of it
When we talk about the long and short of it, we’re talking about how performance-based advertising achieves short-term uplifts for a brand, whilst brand-based advertising offers more performance endurance over the long term.
Ensuring solid brand investment is key to staying ahead when brands experience turbulence. Taking the pandemic as an example, brands started to slash their advertising budgets. Take Coca-Cola as an example: although cuts to their advertising budgets were temporary, the repercussions on revenue continued long after that period.,
A brand that continued long-term brand investment during the lockdown period was Uber. Uber launched their ‘Thank you for not moving’ campaign, encouraging people to do the opposite of what would make money. In the short-term, they took a 75% loss in revenue however, post-lockdown, consumers rewarded brands who demonstrated integrity and invested in top-of-mind marketing. As a result, Uber’s revenue has grown almost every quarter since the Autumn of 2020.
Pandemic-aside, there are of course further benefits to investing in long-term brand growth. Using the example below from a B2C lead gen client, the more we invest in brand, the lower the actual cost per conversion is likely to become over time. The correlation shown here follows 6 months of full-funnel activity.
3. Continuous test and learn
Even when you feel like campaigns are completely optimised, testing will always teach you something and help you understand what is working if things take a turn. This could be simple, such as testing a new landing page within search advertising, or a new ad format within a Paid Social campaign. If the test shows a higher conversion rate or a higher CTR, you can roll out the test to a broader extent.
The below test-and-learn success story shows a B2B client running Paid Social campaigns for the first time. Rather than assuming LinkedIn is the right platform, being B2B, we tested alongside Meta, leveraging relevant audiences in the absence of first-party data. After only a couple of weeks, it was completely apparent that our lookalike audience of website visitors on Meta was responsible for over 90% of all conversions for this campaign, showing the immense value in testing and not assuming.
4. Focus on customer loyalty
It seems obvious to say that customer loyalty plays a huge part in business success, but brands will often overlook its importance when objective-setting. Even if a business sees static metrics year-on-year for acquisition and engagement, an increase in existing customers to repeat purchases can make all the difference to business success even amidst economically challenging times.
Key advice to making this a reality:
- Have tailored communication for your existing customers
- Give them tailored offers to keep them on board
- Provide them with refer-a-friend opportunities
- Remind them of the comparison between you and your competitors so they can rest assured they are with the best
5. Adapt to seasonality
When we talk about seasonality, this doesn’t just mean you should add some Christmas flair to your marketing come December. Think about the following:
- When does your business have increased funding? Is it March time before the new financial year? How can you prepare for that?
- When do your customers experience their pain points the most and have a need for your product or service?
- When do sales teams have any downtime in the year and perhaps can’t nurture leads to the business?
When factors crop up that derail businesses, understanding seasonality helps create efficiencies in putting effort into the right place at the right time.
If you look at a university client, for example, seasonality is complex. The year centres around Summer and Autumn Open Days, when prospective students need to start to decide where they might like to go to study and seasonality will look something like this:
And campaign planning around that ‘seasonality’ might look something like this:
Marketers mustn’t fall into the trap of campaigning and budgeting solely month by month and allow for that fluidity throughout the year.
6. Have a reliable measurement framework
When businesses experience uncertainty, it can be extremely derailing to see major discrepancies in data and reporting. A huge one is a lack of visibility on offline sales and, similarly, not having a fully-functioning CRM.
Marketers may pull back in one area based on the data they have visibility of, resulting in a much bigger drop off than expected. Online data looking positive means nothing if a business on the whole is on a downward trend. Work with data experts to have visibility on the true picture before you start making drastic changes when it comes to your campaigns.
To achieve this pivotal decision-making, ensure you create psychological safety within your teams so they feel empowered to make bold decisions and remove that sense of rigidity from marketing plans.
Ultimately, creating a marketing strategy is absolutely futile if you are unwilling to be flexible with it. If you are testing continuously, you cannot know the outcomes and learnings to take into the next quarter. Placehold activities roughly, but not the detail, especially when plans are so susceptible to change.
Work with an award-winning paid media team
Find out more about our Paid Media and Strategy services at Hallam, including our Overwatch consultancy and Training opportunities and how your business could benefit from expert advice. Get in touch today.