3 Big Reasons Why It’s Time to Reevaluate the Way Your Company Makes Marketing Plans

As any marketer knows, trends for the ways in which businesses reach their customers and sell their products are always shifting – and, in our ever-evolving technological space, it’s crucial to keep with the times. That being said, the general trend in marketing strategy over the last several years has been rooted in the importance of planning for the long-term. And, in theory, it makes sense: after all, every company needs a game plan to reach its goals. That being said, our modern world’s endless capacity for change is changing the ways marketing strategies work – and redefining what it means to plan effectively. If you’re curious about how to revamp the way you strategize in order to stay ahead of the times and see more results than ever, keep on reading.

The Myth of the Long-term Plan

Up until very recently (and in many present spaces),  conventional industry knowledge has taught marketers never to underestimate the importance of planning ahead. Quarterly and annual goals are the name of the game, and meeting them means coming up with a comprehensive strategy. 

This has made marketing campaign builds extremely front-loaded, with strategizing, content creation, and web development needing to get done in the early stages of the quarter or year, with little more than data analysis and supplementary content to occupy marketing teams’ time once a campaign is launched. 

The beauty of this technique is that it provides cohesion: all content pieces are smaller parts of a holistic strategy that, for the most part, doesn’t change much over the course of the quarter or year. After all, it’s important to your business’s brand identity not to make significant pivots or changes in its marketing deliverables, right?

Wrong. The truth is, our dynamic world, where change is constant and the customer is always looking to what’s next, demands marketing strategies that are not rooted in constancy, but in change. The key for modern marketers who want to stay ahead of the game is to strike the balance between changing strategically without compromising consistency.

A New Kind of Marketing Strategy

Nowadays, successful marketing strategies are data-driven and adaptive. Gone are the days of sticking to your quarterly and annual plans, making minuscule changes when absolutely necessary. The speed and specificity of the data we’re able to collect makes it easy – and necessary – to identify which aspects of our marketing strategies are and are not resonating with customers. It is our duty to pinpoint the less effective parts of our strategies and to change them to more effectively give your business’s audience what they want to see. 

This, in a nutshell, is the pivot – and in successful modern marketing, pivoting is the name of the game. This doesn’t mean scrapping entire concepts or rebranding altogether; it means measuring what initiatives are working – and changing the ones that aren’t to more closely match the items that resonate with your customers. 

The key to a successful marketing strategy is to always measure your initiatives, testing different options against each other to see what performs best. Your strategy should be as dynamic, ever-changing, and versatile as your business; it should, for all intents and purposes, be alive. To learn more about creating a powerful adaptive marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Read Kelly’s full article, Don’t ‘Set and Forget’ Your Marketing Plan. Here’s How to Make it Agile, on Business2Community.com.