The new budgets you roll out need to completely reassess how the marketing landscape has changed. Events are dead, webinars are empty, people are not going to work so why buy billboards, everything is moving and you need to create an adaptive budget to meet this new landscape.

What do we know is true? People are in their homes and on their phones, they check their emails, watch tv, and order food.

This is an important time to invest into UX, not the ux team that sit in photoshop and image what a your user is doing. Real research, the psychiatry and anthropologists. You need some science.

Commission a study or do it yourself. Re discover what your users are doing with their life to find where to engage and how to talk.

This means widening the tests to include much more outliners. Don’t just split test “You are” and “You’re”. Try new mediums like sound search, AR, gifts, gamewebinairs, robot popups, drive through meetings. The ground has shifted beyond your old experiences.

All you have now is the ability to learn. Which means hunt experience beyond your normal.

Risk adverse no longer wins as the noise is so loud and the users are so hidden you need something amazing to awake their slumber.

Now, more than ever is the time for BOLD.

Now is the time for science.

Now is the time to change.

What are the questions when preparing a new Marketing Strategy?

1. History

It’s always important to go back and have look at how the last Marketing Strategy went – successes and failures. The most important is for the last year but given the drama of 2020, it would be wise to look at previous 5 years to get a picture of what might happen in 2021.

2. Goals

Next look at the goals for the next year. Increase in sales, of course. But will there be a revamp of products – will there be new products, will older products be discarded. What about ROI. What about extending reach of your client base or are marketing channels to be revised.

Once these have decided at a general top level, the detail can be examined. Looking at the detail may lead to a change in goals.

3. Products

What are the new products that are coming down the line. Do you need more new products. What new products can be developed in the coming year? Are there new vertical products that would support you’re existing base.

What products need to be retired? What are no long making a positive ROI. But be careful to ensure that a losing product is not actually support another winning product. Sometimes it is just better to modify a low or negative ROI, because it brings in customers that then are up sold to another product.

What current successful products need to be refreshed to ensure they continue with their positive ROIs.

4. Know Your Customers

Get full pictures of your exemplar customer. Know what are your exemplar likes and dislikes, how they like their stories told, where they hangout in social media, what shapes their buying decisions.

What types of experiences are you providing your clients. Do they want to keep coming back. What are your costs of obtaining customers from different marketing channels and what additional products do they acquire at what cost.

5. Marketing Channels

For the next year, where are you going to focus your limited budget (it’s always limited no matter how much your budget).

Are you going to extend your channels include more social media or reduce them. Are you going to change the type of influencers you use. Are you going to change to micro-influencers or try different influencers.

Are you going to change your approach in print, video, streaming, TV, email. Where will the advertising funds be focused.

6. Competition

Have a look at your competition. Identify the changes in their trends and where they are likely to head in the coming year. Where are their weaknesses that you can take advantage of and what strengths of your competition can you learn from.

7. A/B Preliminary Test

As part of creating your next marketing plan, do a small about of prototype testing on some way-out and eccentric ideas. They may lead you to a new approach.

8. Plan

You then need to get your plan together and identify what, when and where you want to do things.

9. Budget

And, last of all, when you have the basic strategy put together your budget for the strategy. This will, of course, lead to some changes in the strategy when full costing is done.

10. Refining

Now the long process of refining the plan starts with showing stakeholders the strategy and absorbing their changes. And, of course, when the budget round finally finishes and you know how big is your portion, the process of modifying the strategy to meet the funds available begins. Then its the final approval by all.

When I go to the bank I want my finance taking care of, but i talk to somoone from personal loans and someone from everyday banking and someone from home loans.

As a marketing and sales team inside a company you often inherit a dispersed company that is structured based on the manufacturing and supply of a product. The first job needs to be unifying this structure under customer needs. The customer need needs to structure the KPIs, and then at some point during the org structure, you need to switch to make supplying cost-effective by unifying who is supplying.

So the person who buys the reinsurance cant help the guy who is delivering credit cards in an organisation. So the reality though is where the flip happens and how the KPIS link up so that products can be bundled and delivered together.

Start with the customer mapping using software like

www.custellence.com

www.uxpressia.com

www.smaply.com

Start with mapping out the customer journey. Next part in the series we will take you through how to build a Center of UX Excellence to encourage a unified vision of customer desires.