Reimagining Marketing Strategy

Let’s talk about developing a strategy to deliver intuitive customer experiences across all your brands.

Digital consumer journeys are fast and unpredictable. To respond, marketing strategy needs to identify, understand and act on consumer’s wants and needs as they arise – in real-time. The digital ecosystem enabling these consumer journeys is constantly changing so the strategy must be adaptable. As a process, strategic planning needs to be structured enough to scale while being flexible enough to accomodate different brands.

There are six planning tools that can help. When combined in a process these methods will help you to develop a strategy that is customer-centric and insight-led.

1. UX Modelling
2. Touchpoint Audits
3. What-if Scenarios
4. Roadmap Planning
5. Program Playbooks / Blueprints
6. Measurement & Optimisation

Start by understanding your consumers. User Experience Modelling provides a mental picture of your consumers experience with your brand. The better the resolution of this picture the more challenges and opportunities that you’ll find to improve upon.

Experience Modelling is not a trivial exercise so plan to spend several weeks researching your consumers and creating customer personas. If, like most organisations, different teams are responsible for stages in the journey then get those folks involved. In the end, you all want to own the better consumer experience.

There are a lot of good Journey Mapping frameworks available. Check out the Oracle Designing CX site for ideas and inspiration.

Remember to update your CX Map regularly with new information and customer insights. Remember that this is a fluid planning process.

With your panorama of consumer experiences in front of you it is time to dig into the data. We like to use Customer Touchpoint Audits to research the customer experience from a systems view. This involves extracting information from your ad platforms, websites, email, mobile and social platforms to quantify the customer experiences mapped in step one.

You want to piece together as many of the who, what, when, where, why and how much related facts relating to the customer experiences as you can. Keep the timeframe consistent, explain the logic behind your calculations and maintain a glossary of how things are counted in each system.

Generating returns is your ultimate objective so then next step is to analyse where additional value can be created for customers and your business. This generally means finding ways to increase revenue and/or reduce marketing costs.

Use a value model that suits your activities, generally business-to-business, consumer or a variant thereof. You can choose to include the pre-purchase journey and the post-purchase journey. If you are running a lot of omnichannel marketing with defined strategies such as brand, acquisition, re-marketing, loyalty, retention etc. then it’s best to develop two separate funnel analyses for the pre/post purchase journeys.

With your journey data sorted by journey stages you can compare your marketing program performance to a benchmark. For the first iteration of your value model it’s a good idea to use industry metrics for similar types of marketing programs. Later you can use your own historical data to compare month-on-month and year-on-year performance.

Now that you have identified the challenges and opportunities in your current marketing funnel you are ready to figure out the value of changing tactics. Suspend critical thinking and brainstorm new tactics with your smartest folks to develop solutions. Test and challenge the feasibility of each option then create a short list of new tactics. You can use analysis work-plans to keep it organised.

Next, run ‘what-if scenarios’ to calculate the impact on revenue or costs starting with the under-performing stages in your funnel. This will give you a set of new marketing programs ranked by value. As revenue-focused marketers, we now know which programs will deliver more value to the business.

It would be great if we could just tick off the list but before you go to market you need to consider what you will need to implement these new programs. Do you have the data to target and personalise? Is your content ready? Are skilled people available to launch and measure your programs? Can you get the budget approved? These dependencies factor into your next step, the UX Roadmap.

Most of the time new marketing capabilities need to be developed in phases. Start with the highest value program that you have the means to deliver in the short term. Crawl before you run. Take what you learn and apply it to the next, more complex, program.

Plot your programs on a timeline (12-18 months). Identify the enablers for each program. Assign responsibility and set deadlines for the enablement projects. Use the forecast from the scenario planning step to support the business cases.

With your first new marketing program identified and scheduled on your roadmap you are almost ready to get a ‘quick win’. First make sure you have the audience data, segments, content and activation channels to launch the program. Program Playbooks are an excellent way to define your goals, ensure you have what you need and know how you will measure success. Each playbook provides a single reference for everyone involved. Combined they provide a ‘how to’ guide for digital marketing that can be shared to do more at scale. 

Measurement and optimisation play a key role in both marketing program improvement and supporting the organisational changes brought about by new ways of working.

Every marketing program can tell us something valuable. Marketing managers can see which tactics were more effective in terms of reach, relevance and returns. They can create new tests to confirm what’s causing the program results and explore novel approaches with the supporting evidence. A habit of highly effective marketers is to regularly review results and take action to improve results.

Insights fuel the progress of your Marketing Strategy by providing the evidence needed to overcome inertia and resistance to change. Many digital projects fail despite delivering superior results because they lack executive support. Showing a measurable increase in marketing effectiveness goes a long way in maintaining executive commitment.

Many organisations already use these six tools in their marketing planning. The main idea is to use them together in a fluid strategic planning process that adapts reflexively to changes in customer behaviour and purposefully leverages new digital marketing opportunities.