When times are good, businesses can emerge, grow, and thrive.
There’s plenty for all, and it’s just a matter of claiming your piece of the pie. But when times are tough, we begin to see what those businesses are really made of.
Without marketing resiliency built into the business model, marketing departments can’t adapt and continue to grow despite the ripples and undertow of troubling waters.
But in these times, marketers are learning to leverage technology like they never have before. Through it, they don’t just survive apocalyptic levels of disruption but can succeed, reaffirming why they’re indispensable within their organization.
How are they doing it? Keep reading to find out!
Improve Data Collection & Make It Usable
Your audience demands premium content. Do you currently have the technology in place to deliver?
To build resiliency, your business must understand the current environment in which you’re working to generate leads and guide the buying process.
Improving the way you collect and use data is key to maintaining this level of awareness and proactiveness.
Better data helps you create the high-impact content your customers are searching for and want to engage with.
You can spend less time creating “meh” content and more time creating content that customers will use as stepping stones to their buying decisions, the kind they appreciate as a seamless extension of the brand experience.
Utilize AI technology at the research stage to learn, not only what kinds of content customers need, but also how they’re continually interacting with content to improve marketing messages, resources, and strategies.
Expand the accessibility and interactiveness of that content across content assets to align with the phases of the buyer’s journey.
Learn more with each piece of content and build to scale to reliably drive revenue and demonstrate why the organization you work with chose you to lead marketing efforts in the first place. The right technology helps marketers deliver results.
Automate to Maintain Agility
When you set something in motion through automation, it can seem inflexible at face value.
Doesn’t automation lock you into a certain course of action, a set schedule of activities, a pre-determined direction?
On the contrary, automation allows you to pre-plan and execute often monotonous, no-brain-required tasks in set intervals, freeing up your higher-level thinking and instinct to adapt and take advantage of emerging opportunities in real-time.
As automation advances — thanks to AI technology — it can take on even more complex tasks to further your efforts to build marketing resiliency.
Accelerate the Sales Cycle With Interactive Content
We like to think of interactive content as fertile soil. When soil is fertile, plants grow faster, get bigger, and produce sweeter, more nutritious fruit; are we right?
The interactive content that modern marketing technology makes available to companies is this fertile soil for your sales cycle.
So if interactive content is fertile soil, it’s not hard to see how itaccelerates the sales cycle, maintaining a steady flow of leads, even when times get tough.
Interactive content accomplishes this in several critical ways:
- demonstrates that you understand the audience and what they’ll find most useful;
- displays the perfect message at just the right time. Think scroll over, expand, learn more, but also games, ebooks, and webinars in which you put the customer in control of the flow of information and just how deep they research before they’re ready to buy;
- is so shareable. People feel smart about what they’ve found (your content), and they want to share it;
- strengthens the relationship you have with prospects, new customers, and repeat customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey;
- generating more timely and useable feedback. When content is interactive, you know when and where people click and hover, how long they stay, and what they were looking at before making a purchase. Turn this kind of data into usable business insights to make even higher-performing content.
When feedback is timely, you adapt quickly, reducing waste and eliminating those content “misses” that plague so many content plans.
When a swing and a miss leaves so many regular customers scratching their heads, you can recover quickly to demonstrate you’re listening and actively engaged in a two-way brand conversion.
Increase Conversions With Sales Enablement Content
Data-driven content that you achieve through the right technology gives your sales team exactly what they need to close the deal with customers quickly and with less follow-up and potential for dropped opportunities.
Identify objections and hesitancy and build out your content assets and empower sales with targetedsales-enablement content.
The role of marketing is to generate highly-qualified leads for sales. But let’s face it: one of the highest points of contention between marketing and sales is that leads arrive that aren’t as sales qualified as marketing believed.
When marketing builds content that is specifically focused on sales enablement, you strengthen the partnership between sales and marketing while improving the overall effectiveness of content earlier in the buyer’s journey.
With sales-enablement content, you’re never accepting “just good enough.” It gets you out of survival and activates thrive mode for your teams and company.
That’s the kind of marketing resiliency that organizations need right now, and it’s what we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the future.
Foster Employee Engagement
Employee engagement in the U.S. is incredibly low. Only around 34% of employees feel regularly engaged at work, according to recent Gallup research. But fostering employee engagement is a worthy goal. Companies with engaged employees experience a21% boost in profitability and 59% less turnover.
How do you foster employee engagement? Employees who feel they have a voice are 4.6X more likely to give it their all regularly.
Marketers who are leveraging technology to escape survival mode are experiencing this phenomenon. They’re building a community that employees choose to be a part of, so they’re not just there for a paycheck or because “it’s their job”.
Technology can nurture employee engagement by providing constructive feedback and giving employees a voice in organizational objectives.
With 50% of the U.S. workforce now working remotely and many companies planning to keep a higher percentage of employees remote, this has never been more important.
Create Brand Experiences
Ultimately, we’re creating a brand experience with technology where content is a seamless extension of how customers use, enjoy, and share your product or service.
Content experiences add value to whatever it is you’re selling. They generate that premium product mentality that gets people to pay more for the same general item.
Brand experiences influence how people see themselves as members of the various communities in which they participate.
Content should be a two-way conversation. When it’s not, it’s fairly obvious. People feel talked at — no one’s listening.
Brand experiences immerse customers in the brand and turn them into advocates for it. This may look a little different if you’re the marketing team working with Red Bull vs. Morton Salt, but technology combined with human innovation is what makes success stories like these possible and consistently repeatable.
Want to learn more about marketing? Try our Marketing Planning Bundle for 2023.
