How are you preparing for the future of digital within your business decisions? Do you react to existing customer insights and data? Do you monitor and embrace trends? When future-proofing your digital marketing strategy and business operations, there are a few different routes you can take.
We’re sharing some of the most popular methods to help guide you through the digital transformation of your business for years to come.
Listen to Your Customers
Our marketing sensitivity analysis helps you determine what your customer needs to ensure you build engagement over time. We take a look at lead activity, CTA engagement and determine “interesting moments” that can help you have a better pulse of your lead engagement. Gaining this deep understanding of your customer is absolutely necessary to help you anticipate your next business move. By generating actionable insights, you’ll be able to quickly improve customer outcomes and even predict upcoming roadblocks and behaviors.
Bringing this knowledge to your sales team is essential in helping improve the customer experience from start to finish. Gaining insights from both teams can help you align digital activities, help you improve how you build websites, and even streamline your campaign set-up.
Accurately identifying the activities that lead your customers to conversion can and will set you apart from your competitors and help you successfully allocate resources. Be wary of locking yourself into one singular strategy, just because it works now doesn’t mean it will work always.
Deliver Accurate Content
Content should be at the center of everything you do. It isn’t enough to create a large library of content, you need to ensure you’re aligned with the customer’s needs and wants. The third component to consider in this ‘content trifecta’ is timeliness. To be able to showcase your company’s knowledge and insights, you need to communicate in a highly personalized and segmented manner. Remember: Content affects marketing automation.
Delivering accurate and targeted content will not only aid in increasing business awareness or conversion but can also help with employee engagement and customer retention. Connecting with your customers on a regular basis is an invaluable way to future-proof your business and build a customer base for the future. The use of snippets, efficient marketing automation program set up and simple things like folder structure can help ensure you’re able to stay consistently aligned to consumer needs. Conducting an audit can help you quickly determine if you’ve got the right content or need to focus on a more robust strategy.
Being able to predict the types of content your customers need will also help guide your team through the sales and marketing funnels more effectively. By providing resources that are proactive, rather than reactive, you can shorten sales cycles and create the knowledge consumers need to make confident purchases quicker.
Be Open to New Ways of Working
It goes without saying that hybrid work environments are here to stay, but what does this mean for the future of your business? Well, there are a few fundamental shifts that will not only impact how we work and do business but also how we live. This in turn will have an overwhelming influence on consumer behavior.
Your business has to be nimble and ready to adapt and learn on the go. Rapid trial and error is one way to attack the future, but we recommend never being afraid of the ‘test and learn’ method informed by your existing marketing and sales activities.
Collaboration roadblocks can often be completely dependent on the business model, workflow setup, or tool optimization. We recommend regular system audits to ensure you’ve got the correct strategy to enable consistent marketing activities, efficient business processes, and less gatekeeping.
Encouraging diversity of ideas can help you always trend toward the future. Studies show, ‘racially and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to achieve above-average results.” Incorporating diversity into your brainstorming, marketing, and business sessions can help creativity thrive so your business can deliver the best customer experience.
Align Your Teams
We can’t say this enough, but digital transformation requires you to ensure all your teams are adopting new technology in tandem. While marketing may lead some of the efforts, it’s important that your sales team is briefed on any new strategic or platform changes. Rather than fear change, one should adapt and create internal alignment around milestones and goals regarding digital transformation.
It’s not enough to be prepared on the marketing front, all teams must be ready to execute and embrace change at a moment’s notice. Don’t forget it’s important to also find tech you can grow with. Choosing the best marketing strategy works hand-in-hand with choosing tech that can either last indefinitely or be easily upgraded. Leave room for growth to stay fully aligned.
Know Your Competition
Your competition might not always be direct, you’ve got to keep your eye on all types of indirect competitors or adjacent competition that may sell a service well or provide exceptional customer service. Being able to understand their success enough to replicate it for yourself is a practice that can help you future-proof.
Another worthy competitor that is often overlooked is tech. Whether you’re being challenged by consumer or commercial tech, new capabilities in the hands of customers (and competitors) could make your product more desirable or completely obsolete. Knowing what technology is on the horizon for both your consumers and competitors can help you pivot your business strategy to ensure you’re able to grow on your own, while still keeping the pace. If a competitor has a better grasp of technology, chances are ‘they could outpace you in efficiency and appeal.’
As many as 42% of failed companies cite the ‘lack of market need’ as a reason for their failure.
When consumer preferences change, even the best marketing campaign won’t be able to sell your product. You’ve got to know how your audience is evolving to successfully future-proof your offerings.
The Final Word
The importance of marketing and sales alignment, journey building and embracing change are common themes we continue to embrace and acknowledge with the changing economic landscape. It isn’t enough to understand your data and execute on what you know, there must be a fine balance of forward-thinking, while still gathering learnings from your existing target audience.
Working with an agency that can provide an objective view of your business, help you with process optimization and team management is an avenue that can put you on the path toward future-proofing your business. Chances are the problems you’ve faced aren’t new to an agency that sees all types of business processes, approaches to data, and business strategy. The most important step is to continue to invest in your business and set milestones along the way.
Consider partnering with GNW Consulting, we can help ensure your business achievements are future-proofed for the long haul. We recommend starting with a discovery session, so we can plan your roadmap toward continued success.
Sources:
https://blog.marketo.com/2020/09/why-digital-transformation-is-crucial-for-marketing-and-sales-alignment.html
https://neilpatel.com/blog/cookie-based-advertising-wont-work
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/tried-and-true-sales-marketing-alignment
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2018/03/29/is-it-possible-to-future-proof-your-marketing-strategy/?sh=2d5a91c83a4b
