Digital and Marketing Strategy in 2018

Start Your 2018 Marketing Planning Now

Now is the time to plan your marketing and digital strategy for 2018! Cruising into the new year without a strategy to win and clear direction is not an option. Getting to clarity now empowers you to hit the ground running on January 1, 2018. If you are having trouble getting clarity for 2018, here are three suggestions to get you started.

#1 – Extend Your Digital Strategy to Unexpected Places

Everyone has a digital strategy in place, but not everyone is executing on it. A Google search for “digital marketing strategy” brings up 48,000,000 responses in 0.77 seconds. That number will continue to grow because the speed of change in digital marketing continues to accelerate. The strategy you put in place a year ago, or even 6 months ago, is already out of date.

Since your old plan may be outdated, consider extending your digital strategy to new places in advance of the competition. Marco Giberti and Jay Weintraub, just published, The Face of Digital: How Digital Technologies Are Changing The $565 Billion Dollar Events Industry.

Speaking of the live event industry, the authors state, “…digital transformation is knocking hard on the door. … We can answer the door and welcome it in, or we can put our fingers in our ears and pretend we don’t hear it. Either way, such transformation will make an entrance.”

By utilizing second screen technology in live meetings, you can do everything in a live meeting that you do for audience engagement on the internet or mobile devices. In fact, there are many kinds of information people will share with you in a live meeting that they would be hesitant to share in other virtual environments. This new data is just what you need to differentiate yourself from the competition.

#2 – Fine Tune Your Content Marketing Strategy with New Personas

Because of digital transformation, buyers and markets change faster than the speed of most marketing organizations. In his recent Harvard Business Review article, Digital Transformation is Like Urban Planning, Paul Beswick says, “there are three urban planning strategies, commonly followed by major metropolises, that leaders can use for inspiration in the race to keep up with digital competition. They include building glistening landmarks that anchor their digital strategy (as Dubai has done), removing roadblocks and bottlenecks to improve their underlying speed and agility (Boston), or changing course altogether to construct an entirely new city (Shanghai).”

One make-sense starting place for digital urban planning is personas. To update existing personas for sales and marketing, you can ask a series of questions:

·      What major trends have changed the industry?

·      What has changed in the job of your target persona?

·      What new job titles have emerged?

·      What new challenges have arisen?

·      What event or triggers create urgency for your product or service?

#3 – Re-evaluate Your Buyer’s Journey and Re-align Marketing with Sales

I recently heard Brent Adamson speak at a sales event. If you don’t know Brent, he is one of the authors of The Challenger Sale. I have watched Brent and The Challenger Sale methodology transform both marketing and sales to overcome the number one competitor faced by almost every company involved in complex sales: do nothing.

A foundational principle of The Challenger Sale is the idea of “taking control of the customer conversation.” To take control, Adamson recommends using commercial teaching to guide the client toward what to buy. Ideally, this teaching will create some unrest and urgency in the mind and emotions of the buyer.

At his recent talk, Brent introduced a new idea. He stated that along with teaching the client what to buy, we need to teach the client how to buy. Since most buyers have a negative reaction to the entire buying process, they often end up with buyer’s remorse, no matter how great their new product might be. By helping potential clients learn how to buy, we can smooth the buying process and make it a positive experience.

As an example, I recently published an ebook, Meeting Technology Buyer’s Guide, on behalf of Educational Measures. Since it was published, it has been one of the most popular downloads on the EM resource page. In addition, it was picked up by MeetingsNet and featured in the article, Geek Speak: What to Ask When Buying Meeting Technology.

As you re-evaluate your buyer’s journey, a buyer’s guide can become a new rallying point for both sales and marketing to better engage your prospects in 2018. Work together to combat the “do-nothing” attitude of buyer and make the buying process a positive experience.

Now is the Time!

I’m sure we could sit down over a glass of wine and come up with half a dozen other ways to create a winning strategy for 2018. The most critical point is to start now. Use September to gather data from your sales and marketing automation systems and to do some research online. In October, identify some potential strategy changes or areas that need attention. The end of October is the right time to have your draft plan in place. Set time aside in November to finalize your plan. Get all approvals for the plan in the first week of December and you are all set to hit the ground running on January 1, 2018. 

© 2018 – John Santaferraro