Convincing executives and finance managers to spend money on marketing is almost always an uphill battle. It takes time to build trust and create buy-in at the c-level for any marketing strategy.
Not surprisingly, once a marketing team has secured a budget for a given marketing plan it’s easy to fall into the trap of sticking with the status quo year after year. But in today’s swiftly evolving marketing environment, organizations must be willing to adapt quickly or fall behind at the risk of losing marketshare.
Change Management
Change is hard for any organization, particularly when it involves an area of the business as enigmatic as marketing. Announcing a shift away from more traditional marketing with strict, predictable annual plans to a Modern Marketing approach that is fast-paced and more malleable can be a tough sell initially.
Traditional or digital. Agile or omnichannel. Modern Marketing is a holistic methodology that incorporates all of these to connect brands with real customers and drive business results by blending strategy, creative, technology and analysis. But the jargon matters less to those in the corner offices than ROI. So let’s appeal to number crunchers in your organization.
Immediate ROI Measurement
What Modern Marketers understand (and must impress upon their organization) is that marketing is an investment, not an expense or line item on a budget. A well-executed marketing strategy can increase the value of the brand. (That’s why they call it brand equity, by the way.) You can’t increase, or even maintain, the value of your brand in the marketplace without marketing.
Back in the days when Mad Men ruled Madison Avenue, marketing was a long-term investment. With print, television, radio, and literature as the primary channels for connecting with customers, it took time to determine what worked and what didn’t.
By comparison, modern digital channels certainly make the measurement component of marketing much easier. In some cases, providing almost immediate results once a campaign launches. Furthermore, these new channels give us the ability to drill down deeper into the data to analyze performance on a more granular level.
The benefit of faster, more comprehensive measurement is two-fold. First, marketers are able to fulfill the need for more immediate ROI by those who giveth and those who taketh away the marketing budget. Second, it provides for greater agility, allowing your marketing team to much more quickly adjust strategies, channels, or messages to better meet the needs of specific audiences. The result of this greater agility is more effective marketing and significantly less waste.
Connecting the Touchpoints
When considering the benefits of enhanced measurement, it is tempting to forgo the use of more traditional channels in lieu of these newer, digital marketing channels. However, it is important to remember that marketing is all about connecting with customers. Salesforce estimates that an individual will encounter 6-8 touches before converting to a qualified lead. A number that includes both digital and traditional channels.
Modern Marketers understand that every piece of marketing has value and impacts your brand equity. While inbound marketing efforts may be easier to tie to the specific actions of your customers, outbound marketing supports brand awareness and contributes to the outcome of your overall strategy.
Automated Agility
Making the shift to Modern Marketing also means incorporating new technology and automation into your processes that help maximize your efforts and efficiency. You can now leverage technology to schedule and automate tasks like content delivery, list management, campaign management, and metrics/reporting, thus eliminating repetitive tasks and freeing up staff for other marketing initiatives. In other words, with the right solutions in place you’ll spend less time accomplishing more than ever before.
The need for organizations to adapt to the fast-paced, data-driven strategies of agile marketing is very real. Those that fail to invest in their marketing will get left in the dust. Whereas marketing teams who embrace a Modern Marketing methodology sooner rather than later will be better positioned to respond to the evolving needs of their customers and will reap the rewards of a more sophisticated and efficient marketing strategy.
