It’s time to devote your resources to generate actions that really matter, discarding those that don’t and changing the direction of the rest.
It’s time to devote your resources to generate actions that really matter, discarding those that don’t and changing the direction of the rest. Customers and the marketplace have re-evaluated their values and strategic objectives due to relentless market changes, which has affected marketers directly. Shrinking budgets and the pressure for a new strategic vision for companies to lead the customer experience and drive growth have created a more challenging path for marketing. However, many will believe that if the digital age has created more channels, greater customer contactability and more tools in the hands of marketing leaders, why is it being even more challenging to deliver?
See change for what it really is – what are the leaders who have been able to demonstrate significant return on their marketing strategies doing?
Instead of clinging to the traditional, those survivors have revolutionized the way marketing is done to manage the complexity of the marketplace. Leaders are transforming their thoughts and beliefs with actions. Customer behaviors are constantly evolving, they have been quick to understand changing customer priorities and, as a result, are re-evaluating which marketing activities to keep, which to stop and which to evolve. Seventy percent of marketing executives think the pandemic would only have short-term effects on consumer psychology and behavior. However, leaders, radical realists, discover the truth of customer change by listening to customers, and to approach them, they know they have to be contextually relevant. Here are the questions most discussed by marketing pioneers that allow them to survive the pace of change.
How do you reconnect with your customers?
- Focus on what really matters: Put customers at the center of the conversation, from creating advisory boards to giving them a voice in product or service development.
- Discard Buyer personas: Humanize customer segmentation, moving from one-dimensional caricatures to multidimensional views.
- Reformulate what you measure: Evolve performance measures to reflect the outcomes that matter most to customers, not just to the company.
- Find your collective differentiation: It’s time to reconfigure the company around its collective difference, eliminating competing ambitions.
How to find your collective difference?
- Build trust: Take ownership of a vision that the entire organization can get behind.
- Scrap old operating models – Lead the charge in the business to evolve the operating model to eliminate friction, support data-driven decisions and create better work environments.
- Stake relationships: Communicate marketing strategy to internal stakeholders.
- Move at the pace of change: Reconfigure the organization to move at the pace of customer and market changes.
- Trade marketing for speed: Have an operating model, ways of working and technology capabilities that enable rapid and fluid change. The most successful are making this a priority.
How to move with the pace of change?
- Make better decisions: Cut to the chase and trade long business cases for executive summaries.
- Discard narrow thinking: Avoid over-focusing on one method or approach to improve organizational speed and take a broader view of all components.
- Allow experimentation: Easily test new ideas and find those to invest in on a large scale, ensuring that the organization is ready for change by design.
- Find out what no one wants to do: Focus on what really motivates you to do your best work.
- Delegate with trust: Redirect the way you work through trusted leaders. Realizing that they don’t have to do everything, they empower other groups and partners with the right skills and capabilities to take their share of responsibility.
How do you find out what no one wants to do?
- Focus on marketers: Create an environment where marketers feel they can share their opinions.
- Discard temporary investments: Avoid the temptation to invest in tools before streamlining existing ways of working. Focus on improving processes to better serve customer needs.
- Realign future work: Be transparent with employees about how their roles will change.
- Empathize with your customers: Focus on your target customers. Among all salespeople, leaders are best positioned to do this because they feel the deepest connection with their customers.
- Connect more meaningfully: Offer channel optimization and touchpoints for your brand.
How do you own what you stand for?
- Focus on brand purpose: Rally employees across the enterprise as the best evangelists of brand purpose.
- Discard empty promises: Make sure the brand purpose is meaningful and specific to the organization.
- Reconfigure the culture: Foster an open and creative culture that accommodates rebels and recognizes that pushing the envelope is essential today.
Leaders have found that changing and getting rid of things produces greater benefits. More growth. More meaning. Even more joy. So instead of getting burned out, they’re igniting a rallying cry that’s changing marketing. Together, we can reshape your organization for transformational growth.
Author: Mariana Alvarez A