Are Results Part of Your Marketing Plan?

We’re well into another year. And if you’re responsible in any way for marketing within your business, it’s the time to finally embrace today’s new marketing model as part of your plan. In order to properly capture data and protect one’s investment in marketing, a skillful blend of both digital and traditional marketing methods will be required.
It’s no surprise that the increase in new channels and technologies have dramatically changed marketing. Yet the speed in which this is taking place continues to increase. In order to keep up, companies now need to leverage the full scope of their marketing capabilities and analyze the results so that proper targets can be identified, the correct resources allocated, and marketing budgets are controlled. Without doing so, marketing efforts could generate nothing more than noise and expense rather than promotion and profits.

According to a Chief Marketer Poll, over half of marketers expect their budgets to increase in this new year, but many still don’t feel they are optimizing their marketing strategies…in particular, digital strategies. While Business to Business (B2B) brands tend to use metrics such as return on investment (ROI), Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers have traditionally used key performance indicators (KPI’s) to gauge the success of their marketing.

We consider the increase of digital strategies a blessing. It has clearly unveiled the importance of our mission as marketers: to build data for future sales and reduce wasted spend. Yet many companies continue to feel threatened by digital marketing strategies. This is to be expected. After all, it’s difficult to allocate internal resources with all the necessary skills required to keep up with the constant updates and new technologies evolving in marketing. Additionally, building a marketing structure in a way that interacts with other business functions, as well as traditional marketing elements, can be a real challenge due to the constant demands of daily business.

Today there are new competencies and capabilities required when marketing. Expertise such as data development and analytics, customer experience, content, multichannel and personalization are seldom properly understood, nor being met. Although we all acknowledge this change in the marketing industry, it’s been challenging for businesses to reflect this change within their company structure.

We invite you to embrace change and collaborate this year. Bring marketing to the table when identifying target markets. This will help ensure that the necessary competencies and capabilities are addressed in creating an efficient, effective plan for your marketing strategy. Help your team function within your company in an effort to improve how marketing works both within itself and with other business functions within the company. Don’t hesitate to contact us should you have questions. We’re here to help your company realize the full potential of your marketing.