5 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy Shouldn’t Be Set in Stone | Social Joey
Crafting a marketing strategy can be challenging. It requires a good bit of research, both into general trends in marketing and into your specific audience. So it only makes sense that you’d want to “set it and forget it,” right?
Wrong! Your marketing strategy should be living and breathing—it needs to evolve regularly if it’s going to drive customers to your business or franchise.
In fact, it’s a good idea to regularly review your strategy, ensuring it’s keeping up with the times and meets your current needs. The changing of a season, like the beginning of fall, or the beginning of a new financial quarter can present an opportunity to review and adjust.
But why do you need to take a fresh look at your marketing strategy? Read on as we share reasons the strategy may need to evolve.
Reasons Your Marketing Strategy May Need to Change
Like most things in business, your marketing plans and content strategy will occasionally need to shift. Why? Here are five common reasons:
1. Your Customers Are Changing
If we’ve learned anything in the last year and a half, we’ve learned that customer needs are constantly evolving. What we need now, in month 15 of the COVID-19 pandemic, is much different than it was in March of last year.
As times have changed, consumer needs have, too. Consumers in today’s world want access to more online—they want to be able to make purchases online, or at least be able to prepare to make a purchase online. They want readily accessible information at their fingertips.
That means adapting your marketing message to meet them where they are. You need a mobile-optimized website, capable of allowing customers to peruse your services or products and make purchases. You need to anticipate customer questions and answer them through your content, both in long-form on your website and in short posts on your social media.
2. Techniques Evolve Over Time
Imagine if you could only market to your audience using the trends and techniques in place 10 or 20 years ago. There’d be a lot more print materials and a lot less digital. You’d be responsible for placing ads on billboards and in newspapers, rather than buying ads on websites and social media.
That blog you fill with solid content for your business? It wouldn’t even exist. You’d type up your thoughts and then have them printed to mail to your audience, meaning your message might be outdated by the time it arrived.
As the world changes, so do marketing techniques. Blogs, social media posts and e-newsletters are all common ways to reach an audience today. But that may change tomorrow, and your strategy would need to evolve again.
3. Technology Changes, Too
This is tied pretty closely to the point we raise above. After all, the digital evolution marketing has seen in the last two decades is due in great part to technological advancements.
With the rise of the internet came an increased reliance on computers and the advent of digital marketing. With the rise of the smartphone and the tablet came a need to present customers and potential customers with the information they can easily read on a smaller device. Enhanced smartphone cameras have driven an increase in video marketing that’s tied together with the addition of “live” video capabilities on social media.
What’s next? Your guess is as good as ours!
4. Disasters Don’t Stick to a Schedule
It’s a fact. These days so much is happening in our country and our world that it can be overwhelming at times. As the saying goes, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
Every year, even when we’re not facing a global pandemic, our cities, regions, states, and nation face disasters and emergencies, both natural and manmade. When faced with chaos, your business can’t respond with the marketing message you’d previously planned out and scheduled.
You likely have a detailed set of emergency plans for your franchise. But have you thought about the role of communication in those plans? When an emergency occurs, you need to know exactly how you’ll communicate with your employees, your customers, and the general public.
That means having plans in place about freezing your scheduled marketing content and creating and publishing timely information. If you don’t adapt your marketing strategy when a disaster occurs, your brand will become a cautionary tale in what not to do and you’ll likely lose customers.
5. There’s a Changing of the Seasons
No matter what industry you’re in, your business likely has some sort of seasonality to it. In some cases, like those offering lawn care services throughout most of the country, the changing seasons may mean that your business offerings change or even that you shut down for a month or two in the “offseason.”
In other cases, though, the changing of the seasons bring new products or simply a need to align with customer interests. Take fall for example It’s the season of never-ending pumpkin references! As soon as the calendar flips from August to September, consumers begin looking for lattes, harvest-like decorations, candles that smell like apples, and cozy sweaters.
When that happens, if your brand messaging is still talking about days at the pool, iced coffee, and trips to the beach, at best you’ll be ignored; at worst, your brand will be considered less of a go-to resource.
That’s why a seasonal marketing review can be helpful, allowing you to re-gauge your business needs, take a fresh look at your customer personas and their wants and needs and review what’s happening all around.
The Bottom Line on Marketing Strategies
There’s no “set it and forget it” when it comes to marketing. Nearly every aspect of the work we do as marketers is constantly in flux. Life changes, and that means our marketing messages and techniques have to change, too.
It’s important to regularly take a look at your strategy and determine how it should evolve as you move forward. Incorporating new and fresh approaches—and matching up with new consumer needs—can help you stay ahead of the game.
Need a hand with your social media marketing? We can help! Turn it over to the Social Joey team and let us go to work—it’s the closest thing to a “set it and forget it” button. Get in touch today to get started.