By Bekki Bushnell, Associate Director
Marketing is in a constant state of flux. Always a trend that promises improvement, advances in automation, encroachment of AI… The list goes on. There is, however, one thing that stays the same, and that’s the pressure to deliver – more often than not tied with doing more with less. More leads, more content, more support to sales. Delivered with more speed and agility. That’s just the nature of the beast.
In our experience, conversations with our clients and prospects, budget (or the lack thereof) plays a major role here. Not just in terms of campaigning, but resourcing too. Tightened budgets likely mean a more junior team tasked with delivery and a lack of support at a more senior level.
Looking at the bigger picture, you have to make sure you’ve got the right strategy in place to deliver an integrated and connected experience – in line with what your prospects and customers are looking for. And with more marketing channels to think about, you need a constant and consistent stream of high quality content to keep all areas of the marketing machine fed, from content marketing, to sales enablement and social media. This often ends up less integrated and more siloed, making the argument for a specialist approach to campaigning, which brings it full circle back to budget.
On a tactical level, keeping up with the latest trends across comms, marketing, social, creative is a full-time job in itself. And yet… it has to be done and has a massive influence on the strategy you deliver on.
But this isn’t a one-way vitriol aimed at the challenges of marketing. It’s a blog about solutions. Like I said, we have open and honest conversations with our clients and prospects and there are a few things we suggest to help them overcome the resourcing barrier.
Here they are:
Siloes are bad – say it with me! Stay away from siloed approaches across different channels. Not only is it a recipe for disaster, but it’s a waste of precious resource (time, effort, money) creating specific campaigns for each channel. In today’s communication ecosystem, you need to talking to your customers with consistent themes and messaging across the channels. Which leads to the next tip…
Smarter integration. Optimising your resource begins with making them work smarter – through integration. The more integrated your approach to comms, the better. Establish your brand positioning, create your messaging, develop the narratives and create hero campaigns from there, delivering them across channels to maximise your reach and resources.
Compelling content. Your integrated campaigns only work with compelling content. You don’t need masses of content to keep your campaigns on track, you just need a few quality pieces (be that eBooks, articles, audiograms, podcasts, social posts) that are aligned to your audience needs and campaign objectives.
Recycle. Make the best use of your few pieces of quality content. Recycle and repurpose. As comms professionals we do get a bit of content fatigue, but our audiences don’t have that same exposure. So using and reusing assets – tailored for your different channels – is the ideal way to get longevity from your content and make smarter use of your resources.
Don’t stop measuring. Success is largely based on knowing what has worked – understanding which content performs (or doesn’t) for which audiences, on which channels. Don’t just measure at the end of a campaign; keep your eyes on performance so that you can not only replicate success for future efforts, but tweak assets across the lifetime of the campaign to make sure you’re always in the strongest position.
Bridge the gap. Consider where there are gaps in your skills and knowledge, and find a partner that can help. Not necessarily using different agencies for different specialisms, but rather using one partner with the skills under one umbrella who can help you in bringing your campaigns together – whether that’s best practice when it comes to social media, getting creative cut-through or developing compelling content that appeals to your audiences.
This list isn’t exhaustive – and we’re always ready to chat.
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more, or subscribe to receive more of our content.
