Mark Gilman, Professor of SME Growth and Development, and course leader of ‘Enterprise for Success’ at Birmingham City University (BCU), looks at 5 new approaches to take towards your marketing strategy:
A changing market place
Even if your marketing strategy hasn’t change it is highly likely your customers have. There has been a big reduction of traditional in-person marketing, whether that be at events or in passing, with many consumers looking for safer, digital experiences and offerings from companies.
We’ve also seen notable companies gain greater attention from their efforts to promote the social good and customers being more deliberate in their purchasing decisions.
It is highly likely that these behaviours won’t go away, so it’s essential you make changes to your marketing strategy to address this.
1). Take a more targeted approach
With customers being more cautious about building new relationships in the current economic environment, it’s no wonder that 79% of Marketing Officers believe that customers are paying closer attention to businesses they invest in or work with.
Increasing your account-based marketing in your marketing strategy, where you target specific individuals, may help you to increase your success rate with limited additional investment and bring greater loyalty in the long-term.
2). Make sure Digital is a key channel
It sounds common sense, but the dominance of digital communication has really come out over the last few months. Online sales grew by 43% between February and May in 2020, and the need to do business online due to lockdown has made consumers more open and reliant on this channel.
It’s important that this is reflected in your budget and your marketing spend and that you consider investing in online sales if this is something you don’t currently do. It is likely that successful businesses will continue to increase their digital spend, even when their overall marketing budget may suffer reductions.
3).Consider investing in skills and training for yourself
In these recent times it is likely that your budget for hiring or taking on external freelancers may be significantly reduced at the moment, rendering many of your potential activities impossible.
Now is the perfect time for you, as a business owner or leader to invest in personal development and training to give you the skills to weather the storm and learn about making better strategic decisions.
Here are Birmingham City University we offer a host of workshops including the 2-day Enterprise 4 Success programme with 12 hours of support focused on helping you better understand your marketing and leadership strategy.
4). Make use of the gig-economy
You may not be able to acquire full time staff to help you with your marketing plan, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of all of the unemployed talent and graduates out there in the marketplace.
Now is a great time to make use of the gig-economy by hiring talent to work on specific areas of your marketing strategy. Who knows, you may find you build a relationships with them and want to hire them in the long run.
5). If you have the money, now is the time to invest
With lower investment in ad spends online generally, now may be the time to actually increase your marketing investment if you have the opportunity and take risks with your creative. With the changing market there is great potential to be creative.
Interested in finding how you can improve your marketing strategy? Sign up for our next series of Marketing Strategy Workshops…
