how do you ensure your marketing remains effective?
I work with several brands at any one time. I establish long-term partnerships with my clients, contributing to their overarching vision, mission, and value proposition.
Over the years, some of my clients have faced a period of change:
Their audience's needs changed.
They needed to refresh their offering to meet a shift in market dynamics.
Their business objectives had changed since they were last set
These changes all had a knock-on effect on Marketing. As a result, my clients needed direction and support to ensure their Marketing remained effective and continued to serve their audience and their business - particularly Sales.
If you find your business in a period of change you will undoubtedly need to adapt your approach to Marketing.
As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to ensure:
your business aims and the "why" behind their operations align with Marketing’s output
you know your target audience and what they need - especially if this differs from before as a result of the change
your marketing campaigns and activities still cut the mustard given the changes.
Here’s a three-step approach to consider if you’re facing change in your business and you want to ensure your Marketing remains effective.
3 strategic steps to ensure your marketing remains effective
1. Strip everything back
From a Marketing perspective, consider your business objectives, what you do and why - strip everything back:
What do you want to achieve?
Why do you exist?
What sets you apart from your competitors?
What makes you unique?
If your business has rapidly changed its business aims or offering, then these questions need revisiting - the answers will be different from when you last set your marketing strategy.
Write down the business priorities your marketing now needs to support. Be specific about what has changed and which previous priorities no longer apply. This gives you a reference point when you decide what activity to keep, change or stop.
2. Consider your audience
If your target audience and their needs have changed, or your offering has shifted, then think about who needs your service/product and why.
This is a fantastic, practical exercise (over Zoom or a face-to-face workshop) where you think about what personas your audience could adopt. Consider multiple personas depending on your offering:
What is their background?
What are their demographics?
What do they need/want to achieve?
What are their challenges?
You can then start to think and reflect on how you help them and how your service/product solves their challenges and/or presents them with what they’re looking for, why etc. Again, the answers you come up with may be very different to what you originally started with before the period of change.
Bring the answers together in an updated audience profile. Record what you know from customer conversations or other evidence, and flag what you still need to check. Then note what this means for your message: which needs should your content address, and what might customers now need explained differently?
3. Make your marketing count
Review your current activity against those revised priorities and audience needs. For each campaign, channel or regular task, decide whether to:
Keep it: it still supports a clear purpose and the response gives you a reason to continue.
Change it: the purpose is relevant, but the message, format, timing or next step needs work.
Stop it: it no longer serves the business priority, reaches the right people or justifies the resources it takes.
For example, imagine a consultancy moving its focus from large organisations to smaller businesses. It might keep a useful email newsletter, change examples and service information to reflect smaller teams, and stop attending an event aimed at buyers it no longer wants to reach. The decisions follow the change in direction.
Turn the decisions into a short action plan. Give each change an owner, a realistic completion date and a review date. Agree what you’ll look at when you review it, such as the relevance of enquiries or the questions customers ask.
You can then test and adapt your marketing activity while keeping those priorities in view. Make the review a regular part of the work so you notice when the activity starts to drift again.
Facing a period of change? Is your Marketing in a funk? Do get in touch to see how I can help.