- Marketing Expansion Comes On the Heels of Marketing Success
- Hard-Fought Gains Feed Expansion
- New Wins = New Growth Opportunities
Beware the Echo Chamber of Marketing Success
Complacency is the enemy of success, but conversely, marketing success can lead to complacency. You work hard and develop a solid marketing strategy. You run the plan through the gauntlet, refining your message through A/B testing, defining and redefining through data analysis, targeting, and retargeting your various customer personas.
You find the sweet spot and begin to realize promising outcomes, real results. Q4 is looking pretty, pretty good. The numbers are in, and your plan has proven to be effective. However, once you celebrate the victory with your team, the “what next?” question will gradually take hold. The marks of success and deserved celebration are all around, but in equal parts, exuberance, and exhaustion, a nagging realization begins to form, what now?
In marketing terms, this “celebration” should be the Campaign Wrap-Up. You’ve seen defined and tangible results, identified and grown your customer base along with your bottom line, compiled data, and analyzed it for maximum insight. Looking over how you define success and data-driven takeaways, you run down the checklist:
- Metrics/goals reached
- Metrics/goals that fell short (and why?)
- New Insights (what was new/unexpected? what did the data prove or disprove; confirm or deny? what did we gain?)
This process then leads us to the big question:
What Now?
Do you simply take what you learned, rinse, and repeat? Now that you’ve reached your goal, what will you do with the (money/customers/data/insight/intangible details) you’ve acquired? The best answer is to develop an advanced strategy for growth. Enilon helps clients to understand that this isn’t the endgame for them, nor us, as we can take these new resources into new areas of growth such as (in no particular order):
- Increased sales: more, more, more, and then some more
- New product cross-sells: Something new coming online in 2022? Can we leverage what we gained from this last campaign to set that new product up for success?
- Geographic growth: new territories, new horizons, new terrain
- Internal streamlining: It’s time to look at silo-busting, CRM & ERP audits and suggestions, and more.
- Tech growth: Have we discovered hurdles to clear with a new look at the current technologies we’re employing? What is new and available/cost-effective for us? What do we view working for similarly-positioned organizations?
- Competitor growth: This is the time to assess if we can keep similarly-positioned competitors at bay and perhaps start thinking about larger fish.
- Sales team growth: Can we attract – and support – additional talent for internal development, which naturally leads to company growth? Additionally, can we streamline specific processes freeing up your current team to focus more on selling?)
We can assess what you’ve accomplished and how you got there through an advanced performance marketing lens. Now is the time to drill down to see how the processes can be magnified and refocused. Obtaining your next objective, whether expansion into a new market, further refinement of an existing strategy, new product launch, or something different altogether, will define a new finish line and require advanced strategies driven by the data and insights we gleaned from the last campaign.
“I Like My Sugar With Coffee and Cream”
In short, this phase is essentially another strategy session built on the successes and learnings from the last campaign, i.e., think of this as a strategy session, only WAY more informed thanks to the three steps we’ve traveled together, and all of the data we’ve gathered and turned into insights. How we take all of this, refocus on our customer base (perhaps we’ve learned something new about their demographics? As when Starbucks learned their customers like their sugar with coffee and cream. Buyer journey? Pain points? etc.?) and see how we can use either to approach the same initial ask with a greater goal or see ways to expand the company into new areas of growth, as mentioned above.
WHAT YOU AS A CLIENT WILL HAVE AT THIS STAGE:
You will have a detailed report that shows the successes and discoveries. In marketing, failures are merely discoveries, learn, and pivot! “Learning,” as the old saying goes, “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.” After your recently concluded campaign (or still running, but at some point, you have to look back and present a snapshot. With some Key Insights from your Enilon partnership, the dialogue becomes 1) how do we utilize these new resources, and 2) what are our next steps? “What now?” leads to new horizons and new growth.
WHAT WE AS YOUR AGENCY PARTNER WILL HAVE AT THIS STAGE:
We have more than a fully detailed understanding of your initial ask. The steps we took to get here have provided a year of performance data. The results have revealed deep customer and business understanding that allow for further scrutiny into identifying key personas. We have expanded perspectives to apply to future business goals and an actionable roadmap to guide us through our next growth program together. The what now is all about leveraging new knowledge and deep-dive analytics from data-rich insights to create next level results.
