Editorial
The Gist
- Calculated creativity. Embrace innovative campaigns backed by data-driven planning.
- Audience connection. Understand your audience's needs for more effective campaigns.
- Adaptive approach. Constantly monitor, learn and adapt your strategy for success.
In the volatile markets of 2023, with major current affairs occurring day by day, and digital platforms (ChatGPT, Discord, Midjourney and more) disrupting brand engagement, how are organizations expected to stand out in all this noise? Making marketing (and business) efforts sustainable is the key.
Following the same templated format for activity isn’t going to make a significant impact on new audiences. But trying new techniques at random isn’t going to be authentic or effective either.
Instead, stepping out of your marketing box should be done through well-researched and calculated campaigns. Testing out new campaign formats, audiences, platforms or copy may feel like a risk. You could waste investment, lose trust, or destabilize your brand image. But being creative doesn’t need to have a consequence if you’ve done the work.
When backed by data-driven planning and understanding, trying out new ideas will be a valuable boost for brand engagement, lead generation and conversion. This combines to form a natural and essential process of evolution for any organization’s marketing strategy. To ensure that your next marketing "risk" is a confident success — not something you'll regret — it’s important to follow these four steps:
- Do your research.
- Truly understand your target audience.
- Track your results.
- Prepare for failure, learn and adapt quickly.
1. Do Your Marketing Research
The first step in successfully taking your next marketing risk is conducting thorough research. This means understanding your target audience's pain points and needs, as well as the channels and tactics that will effectively reach them. Once you know this, you can better understand the value you can realistically expect to gain from any given activity.
Taking a risk without proper research is just taking an uncalculated guess. You may get lucky, but your chances of success are much lower. For businesses that are unsure of how to begin planning out their next campaign, there are numerous resources available, such as Hubspot's resource center.
Continue this research process until you can confidently answer these three questions:
- What does the marketing activity look like? How much content, social activity, time and designed assets are needed to make this campaign work? What will each component consist of, and what points do they need to cover?
- Who is the target audience? What are the specific pain points, challenges and values of your audience? Is there a specific persona that you’re addressing, and how can you tweak your campaign to appeal to them?
- What are the results and ROI expected? It's important to strike a balance between spending enough to get the results you want and spending so much that you’ll get diminishing returns on your budgets.
By answering these questions, you can ensure that your marketing plan is a calculated risk rather than a poorly thought-out idea.
Related Article: How to Understand What Your Customers Do and Why They Do It
2. Truly Understand Your Target Audience
A lack of coherence or consistency can lead to a lack of engagement. It may even be misleading about the brand or service and work against your efforts.
Understanding how your copy will resonate with your target audience is key to the performance of your latest campaign.
It's important to make sure that your messaging and narrative are tailored to their needs. Online tools such as Answer The Public, Ahrefs, Semrush and Google Trends can give you great insight into your audience. Through these, and many other additional extensions and plugins, you can find out what your audience is commonly searching for, the questions they ask and the best keywords you can use to target them.
Combining these with a formal, definitive matrix of all available personas can help inject clarity and transparency into your latest marketing risk. If you can’t find a tangible link between your newest campaign and these personas, then maybe it’s time to reevaluate.
Related Article: Finding Your Target Audience Through Social Media
3. Track Your Marketing Campaign Results
Track your results regularly and make changes to your strategy as necessary to help you stay ahead of the curve and avoid making regretful decisions.
One of the biggest advantages of modern marketing is the ability to track and measure the results of your efforts. Instead of relying on intuition or qualitative information, use the data available to you to make informed decisions you know will perform well.
Having the right infrastructure in place, such as a flexible and scalable CRM, is key to tracking your results effectively. It provides clear performance data and informs best practices for future efforts, allowing you to reactively optimize activity. Examples of warning signs to look for include:
- Low email open rates.
- Short time-on-page performance.
- High bounce rates.
With these tools in hand, it’s easy to be confident when taking risks. It won’t always prevent lackluster results, but it will enable you to turn the situation around quickly.
4. Be Prepared to Adapt Your Marketing Strategies
Even the most calculated and well-researched decisions need monitoring and optimization. Be prepared to pivot your strategy as needed — and be willing to make changes that may be uncomfortable at first.
The online landscape, social and search algorithms, and audience sentiment are always changing. Staying up to date and adapting strategies is a full-time task.
Personas naturally shift as their needs evolve, and you may find that your same old social media strategy just isn’t achieving the same level of engagement as it was. When this happens, embrace a mindset that isn’t afraid of adapting, instead of doubling down on traditional marketing efforts.
Just some examples of creative (but achievable) marketing risks include:
- Collaborating with external partners and industry leaders.
- A/B testing new formats or creatives.
- Engaging with a new community.
- Publishing new types of marketing collateral (e.g., infographics, videos, podcasts).
- Trying out a new marketing channel, such as Discord, Quora or Reddit.
- Achieve your marketing goals with confidence.
Conclusion: Take Calculated Marketing Risks
Taking risks in marketing is an essential part of driving growth for your business, but it's important to do so in a way that minimizes the risk of regret or negative impact.
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Ultimately, the biggest risk to your marketing is not doing anything new at all. Old processes become stale, boring, and irrelevant, and your engagements and conversions will suffer as a result.
Taking marketing risks is daunting, but they are incredible ways to reach new audiences and grow your business.
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