It’s around this time of year articles about what are the biggest challenges facing marketers in 2013 start sprouting like weeds in a garden.
And, like weeding a garden, you need to work out what will be a useful idea or concept to help grow your ‘brand garden’ and what is a weed. Innovation and new marketing ideas are the biggest challenge because you invest resources without truly knowing if they will help grow your brand or wither.
While innovation must be allowed to grow, here are some gardening (marketing strategy) basics before you start planning;
Always start with strategy
It is easy to latch on to new things and confuse them for a strategy. Here is a good old fashioned definition of strategy.
“Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations”.
Just like your garden, your brand or organisation needs a plan to grow over time. This plan needs to consider what you want to grow, the current climate and what the objectives of your garden needs to be.
Don’t confuse tools for solutions
As technology continues to move at an exponential rate there are lots of tools to help you grow your brand or organisation. But these are tools not strategies and choices need to be made about what tools work best to grow your brand.
Do not grab the latest tools without ensuring a channel balance -an integrated approach always gets the best results.
If we all look at our marketing tool-sheds I suspect we will all find near new gardening tools that promised to make our garden a better place. Perhaps if we stopped to think about the long term strategy we may have bought a few less items or more of the right rather than being caught up in the cleverness of it all.
Data, Data and Data
Knowing how to predict the weather is not a perfect science but the more data you have and the more analysis you do certainly improves the chances of getting it right. Today the buzz is big data, which is just a lot of small data blended together. This can include social data, transactional data, third party data and much more. Creating a strategy around data insights and measurement should be one of your most critical strategies to grow
So get ready for an exciting 2013 and I hope your brand an organisation grows and flourishes!
