Do you get the feeling at the moment that the marketing world is one large mass of opportunity but slightly overwhelmed by the choice and which channels to choose. And when you do choose, how are you integrating your traditional channels i.e TV, Print, Radio? Are all these synching with your online activities?
Thankfully the Chartered Institute of Marketing reminds us that the practice of Marketing remains in tack and defined as follows:
“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”.
The Huffington Post lists 4 critical strategies to help you stand out in today’s noisy world and highlights the need for big business to act more like a start-up by getting to know their customer better as well as developing content which is truly authentic – this will all go a long way to helping your strategic survival for 2013. So now that you know, sit back, take a LIOB (large intake of breath) and realise that the big picture hasn’t really changed that much, after all, you as a good marketer, have always had the consumer at the heart of your business and therefore at the heart of your marketing plan.
Of course the marketing plan itself has changed and now needs to incorporate all your new online marketing channels as well as your traditional ones. In a recent survey from Smart Insights 56% of businesses seem to have now totally skipped the traditional marketing plan altogether and have gone straight for a digital strategy with no marketing plan at all! Understandable for some types of brands, however, for the majority, who are still using offline channels, without an integrated strategy, its going to be difficult to justify the results results of thei campaigns and highlights the need for more developed integrated approaches to avoid any diminished ROI’s.
Perhaps it’s time to review the existing plan to ensure that it incorporates all your channels and that importantly, it connects and integrates all the marketing activities as this will strengthening the campaign impact and making each and every channel work its hardest – Smart Insights provide a checklist including Pickton and Broderick’s 4 Cs of integrated marketing communications. A highly useful resource which provides comprehensive and practical guidance and which you will reference continually during your marketing days is Dave Chaffey’s Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice
