Your campaign strategy needs a sudden overhaul. How will you adapt to external factors?

The important thing to do is first run an impact assessment. By changing your strategy, what do you need to be prepared for in terms of mitigation, but also in terms of how new variables will play a role in how you work and how you prioritize your tasks.

Assessing the impact of external factors is a crucial first step in adapting your campaign strategy. Understanding how changes affect your campaign objectives—both in the short term and long term—enables you to prioritize actions effectively. A thorough analysis of new variables ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, allowing for a targeted response to evolving circumstances. This strategic approach helps maintain campaign effectiveness and agility in the face of external shifts, positioning you for continued success.

Gathering insights from diverse sources is essential for refining your campaign strategy. By incorporating expert opinions, competitor analysis, and feedback from your target audience, you gain a comprehensive view of how external factors influence public perception and behavior. This well-rounded perspective enables you to make informed decisions that not only address current challenges but also resonate with your audience. A multifaceted approach ensures that your revised strategy is both relevant and effective in the evolving landscape.

Revisiting your campaign goals with new insights is crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness. Assess whether your original objectives are still feasible or need adjustment based on external changes. Setting realistic and attainable goals ensures that your team remains motivated and focused on what truly matters. It's more effective to have a few well-defined, achievable goals than to stretch too thin with numerous, unrealistic ones. This approach helps sustain momentum and directs efforts toward achieving meaningful results.

Adapting tactics is a difficult balance as there is a risk of changing them too much and too often without giving them time to prove whether they are successful or not. Especially during a time of upheaval, it is a kneejerk reaction to change tactics if they are not immediately effective. But online marketing, including SEO or a call to action or doing AB testing on your landing pages can take time. Some of these tactics should be given a few months to give them a chance and doing small tweaks in a systemized way. A key part of managing this is understanding when something is a failure and to move on versus when continuous improvement will be a winner.

You can never overcommunicate when it comes to change. We often start with socialization, where we speak for weeks or months in advance that a change is coming. Then we involve the team in understanding and crafting the change that is needed. Then we roll out the change with the team responsible for various parts of it. And then we celebrate and monitor to the change with different teams responsible for different parts of monitoring that the change is working and sticking. You know that the change is really working when people on your team think it was their idea to effect the change. That's real change management!

Setting up a way to monitor your progress is actually step 1! Not the last one. If you have a strategy in place, you should always have a way to monitor whether it is working. Your key performance indicators (KPIs) are the way that you might have even realized that external factors are impacting your business. Even a subtle shift is something to be paying attention to. What are the top 5-8 levers in your business that you can monitor every 2 weeks (or less) to have an idea of the pulse of your business? These are your KPIs. They can include revenue, customers, new hires, retention, average size of customer, leads in pipeline, utilization, capacity metrics, and many MANY others.