Themes Driving Marketing Strategies This Year
The landscape has changed drastically over the last five years, goes without saying, so do the ideas driving strategies. Let’s quickly breakdown the top three themes we believe will impact marketing strategies this year.
Customer Journey Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration is fundamentally about providing exceptional customer service. Whatever form that takes in your business, it requires connecting channels, creating more personalized experiences, and equipping teams with more data across the customer lifecycle.
Customers today expect businesses to provide easy, seamless experiences. And it's often up to marketers to make sure they receive them. So, what functions can marketers play in organizing trips that foster client loyalty? How can businesses develop data-driven marketing strategies?
Marketers must have a thorough understanding of client journeys for journey orchestration to be successful. This means abandoning the traditional linear picture of the route in favor of more realistic journey maps. Journey maps that focus on how consumers make decisions and which decisions are inflection points will assist marketers in identifying opportunities for interaction and eventual conversion.
Customer journey orchestration requires more than just taking the "next best action" or making the "next best offer." And marketing executives must see customer journey orchestration as a strategic requirement in how marketing meets customers, supports sales, and produces value, not just as "the next operational challenge" or "the next buzzword."
Marketing’s Shifting Role in the Enterprise
Marketing is not sales. Marketing is the method of helping customers and businesses find one another and building a mutually beneficial relationship. But it hasn’t always been the case.
Once upon a time, a marketer’s original role was often that of a salesperson. Businesses had products to offer, and they needed to find the right people to sell them to. Typically, “marketers” were involved in selling to stores, other companies and participated in door-to-door sales as well. The role of marketing within enterprises has certainly come a long way with new concerns and methodologies.
The main focuses have become:
Focusing on the Customer Experience (CX)
Making culture an integral part of marketing
Making exceptional customer experience the ultimate goal
Using data to inform your organization about what does and doesn’t work
Utilizing analytics to showcase the actual ROI and economic value of marketing
Strategic Brand Management
Strategic brand management is aimed to aid businesses in gaining (or increasing) brand awareness, increasing revenue, and meeting long-term business goals. Managing a brand can (and should) entail a multitude of aspects, from centralized digital assets to maintaining brand consistency across multiple touchpoints.
Why is strategic brand management important?
Improved brand perception – strengthening selling power – through trust
Increase customer retention, customer loyalty and brand value
Differentiate your brand in order to demonstrate its distinctiveness to buyers
Make marketing communication more impactful
Activate employees to increase engagement and enable them to feel more connected to the organization
Reduce your organization’s vulnerability when it comes to drastic market changes
Creating a brand management strategy requires some exercise. Organizations need to make sure their brand position and values are aligned. They need to actively monitor brand reputation – who is saying what, when where and why. Brands need to centralize their brand material in order to ensure stakeholders know what to use at all times. Additionally, brands need to frequently measure and analyze their performance – confirming that all brand activities are in fact on track.
Whatever themes are driving your marketing strategies this year, ABC is here to help.
