Marketers have known for years it’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it. And the key to a successful rollout of marketing activity is clear-minded, researched and informed marketing planning, knowing your audiences and how to communicate with them.
As traditional marketing roles continue to evolve in response to the pandemic, it has become even more important for marketers to enact their roles through different channels and communicate to shifting audiences that have been saturated with ongoing content and messaging during and after the lockdown period.
Despite these significant changes, the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the truth of marketing fundamentals, and that understanding an audience and their requirements is critical in order to deliver products and services that fulfil their needs and wants. The wants and needs of our audiences are shifting quickly, and all organisations need to review, evaluate and recalibrate their marketing in order to deliver the optimal offer to their targets.
Informed marketing planning is critical to inform smart decision making in a continually changing landscape. But what does activating your marketing look like in a post-COVID world? How can it best benefit your business in a period of declining marketing expenditure?
Evaluating and recalibrating you marketing will provide a number of immediate benefits in current context:
• For your business, it demonstrates the marketing function not only understands the offer but will proactively flex its approach to generate further demand in a methodical and pragmatic way.
• For your Board and senior leadership, it delivers assurance that the organisation and its offer is being promoted in the best and most effective way within a competitive, crowded and convoluted post-COVID marketplace.
• For transparency of marketing spend, it delivers clarity around the best use across channels, so reduced investment is organised prudently for maximum return.
• For market cut through, it shows flexibility and nimbleness in proactively embracing the new and uncertain economic environment, driving competitive advantage and consequent market share.
In this ongoing state of flux, it is clear that returning to the fundamentals is essential. There are three key principals that can assist when initiating a marketing planning process:
1. Deliver genuine value: Attention spans are at a minimum, so deliver content that is worthy of their attention. Reigniting latent loyalty amongst existing, lapsed and potential customers is critical here. Define the sources of value within these three different audiences and understand their unique interests in relation to your existing and future content.
2. Solve a pain point: Immediacy gives currency to your marketing, so seek to solve or address a problem your clients are facing right now. These pain points are likely to be different from what they were pre-COVID, and they have likely shifted from the onset of the pandemic to now as life begins to transition again.
3. Deliver with consistency: Just when you are tired of saying it, your audience is just starting to hear it. Consistency built into all of your plans is essential, so your message achieves cut through.
Planning for external marketing activity will certainly engage your external audiences, but what about internal audiences? All your people are brand ambassadors, and if they also believe in the messages your marketing seeks to deliver in the post-COVID world, they become living and breathing brand marketers for your organisation.
Post-COVID brings both market uncertainty, but also opportunity.
BrandMatters is assisting organisations across multiple industries in re-evaluating their marketing activity and bringing back the fundamentals to ensure they are match fit for the post-COVID context.
Our productised marketing activation solution enables organisations to evaluate their market, identify opportunities and strategies to achieve success, and deploy marketing plans and calendars that are accountable, actionable and manageable.
If your organisation needs assistance in evolving your marketing to meet the demands of the new market, get in touch with the BrandMatters team here.
