Don't get lost in the marketing wilderness

The marketing terrain is changing at speed. Ever increasing consumer expectations, media channels and technology options are making creative planning and decision-making more complicated by the second. Here’s our advice on how to take a pragmatic approach to what can be an overwhelming landscape.

Know your customer

When faced with decision fatigue, our answer is always to revisit what we know about the audience – it’s the fastest way to simplify any marketing strategy! Our Strategy Team continually analyse and interpret audience intelligence data which helps us to understand customer mindset, behaviour and attitudes. Using this insight, we’re able to confidently develop narratives, creative routes, propositions and strategic decisions that we know will have impact with the right groups of people.

Go back to your goals

At its most basic, marketing is a series of techniques that help to deliver on business goals. So, always get clear on what those goals are before planning any campaign or communication activity. Often, we don’t ask our clients to write prescriptive briefs – we just need to know what they’re ultimately trying to achieve and we start the ball rolling from there.

Plan your journey

Speaking to the right customer at the right time with the right message is the fundamental aim of any marketing effort. But we know that preparing that journey can be overwhelming and it’s easy to lose track of what should happen when. Consider using customer experience techniques to plan audience journeys and provide a clear, visual route map of activity at each stage of the sales funnel so that project planning becomes a breeze.

Get good guidance

Starting out with a marketing partner can be daunting. Some of our longest-standing client relationships began with us doing a small favour or offering a perspective on how best to tackle a business challenge, then grew into synergy between two teams of people. Our biggest piece of advice: choose a partner that’s interested in being at the heart of your business, rather than being purely focussed on the next creative deliverable.

In our experience we’ve found that all of these things combined help businesses put their energy in the right places, make the most of their marketing budget and ensure that the creative and technical solutions they invest in are perfectly designed to make the most impact to business objectives. We’re always happy to chat about our process and offer advice with no strings attached so feel free to get in touch if you’d like an objective view on your current marketing approach.