Tips to ensure your marketing strategy drives demand in uncertain times

The pandemic has dramatically altered consumer behaviour, demand for services and opportunities to engage with prospective clients. Your marketing strategy that produced good results in normal times might be largely redundant now.

So it’s the perfect time to revisit your marketing strategy for future growth. Deciding to do nothing and wait it out isn’t a strategy. Looking at the core fundamentals of your marketing plan will make it easier to plan what future growth might look like and what tact to take.

Marketing for future growth

Planning for future growth means you have to make some considered choices about where you think the most growth will come from. You may see many areas of potential growth and it’s easy to fall into the trap of hedging your bets and going after all of it. However, this scattered approach isn’t recommended as the likelihood is, you’ll get none or very little of it. Before you can tailor your marketing plan, you need to forecast where the growth is, and how your capabilities to get it align with the opportunities.

Five questions to ask in evaluating your future growth

• Where will the growth come from?
• Why do you think it will come from there?
• What are you going to do to make it happen?
• How you know your strategy is working?
• Who is responsible for implementing it?

Completing this exercise will help clarify the direction your marketing strategy should take. The next step is to review where your marketing strengths lie and how they align with the growth opportunities.

How to evaluate your marketing capabilities and opportunities

Capabilities

It’s important to know what you’re good at and what takes a bit more effort. Rank your current capabilities using the list below. What’s your strongest capability or the one that generates the most value in your business? What’s your weakest capability?

• Retention – longevity of customers staying with you
• Referrals – your customers referring to you
• Share of customer - your customers buying more from you
• Share of market - winning customers from competitors
• Addressable market - expanding size of the potential market

Opportunities

Once you’ve ranked your capabilities, look at the same list in relation to growth opportunities over the next few years - choosing where you think the most growth will come from and the least growth.

Look at the fit between your capabilities and the opportunities.

For example, if you ranked retention as your number one strength, yet it ranked fifth in terms of growth opportunities, putting lots of time and effort into retention is not likely to drive demand.

If you ranked share of customer as second in your capabilities and it’s also second in the ranking on where you see future growth, then it makes sense to implement a marketing strategy pursuing share of customer.

Drilling down to the fundamentals of your marketing plan in the current environment allows you to channel your resources into a clear, targeted marketing strategy for future growth.

This information was from our Connective Learning and Development programme ‘Strategic management in an uncertain world’ with Professor Don O’Sullivan from the Melbourne Business School.

Find out more about how DMH can help you with personalised marketing campaigns to engage with your targeted audience HERE.