Marketers are reimagining strategies to meet customer needs.
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11 February 2021
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The ability to focus:
what the pandemic has taught today’s marketers
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The marketing industry has gone through enormous change this past year, as have many others. Covid-19 has made all of us rethink our place in the world and in business. Many brands have had to reimagine nearly every aspect of their business - their products, employee experiences, customer engagements and events - with relevance and speed.
So much has changed: meeting rooms turned into Zooms, kitchens became call centres, and brick-and-mortar stores became digital storefronts. We’ve entered an all-digital world, and we’re not going back. This new normal isn’t somewhere off in the distance. We are living it, now.
With this dynamic environment, being relevant is critical. It’s something we’ve always known, but it’s now more important than ever. What customers may have needed six months ago was different from what they need now.
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Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columnist
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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones
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By Steve Hemsley
The year ahead will see many plans come to fruition, making 2021 another year of reinvention, senior marketers revealed at a recent virtual roundtable hosted by Marketing Week and Salesforce. The event was conducted under the Chatham House rule.
→ Recommended: Planning ahead: Everything marketers know about 2021’s consumer
Raj Kumar, Aviva
Reorientating marketing
At one professional services firm, the major lesson of 2020 that is shaping strategy this year is to remember how important relationships are in marketing. Its global marketing director pointed out that staying close to your customers may not be the most “earth-shattering” advice but it is highly effective. Reflecting on this fundamental truth has prompted a complete re-evaluation of marketing’s role with the organisation.
“If you don't invest in that [client] relationship - stay close to the individuals, not just the companies, and understand what they're trying to do - then you become quickly disconnected and then, when the pressure is on, you don't have that foundation,” he said.
“So, the biggest shift in investment for us has been towards account-based marketing, moving from one-to-few, or one-to-many, to one-to-one - an individual client, or a client organisation, focused on as a market in its own right. That is where we have seen almost exponential growth in activity and resource investment.”
“We’ve adjusted our content strategy to realign around what’s important to clients.”
Samantha Burns, KPMG
Fewer things done better
With oversight of new proposals tuned down to the point where marketing is accountable but has added agility, there is the additional benefit of focus. With teams working remotely, rather than in large meeting rooms at headquarters, there have been fewer voices seeking to help guide the function’s strategic thinking. These teams have been able to double down on what is truly important.
The director of marketing at another professional services firm believes this has allowed teams to focus on doing fewer things better. She believes that, while most marketers are keen to get back to face-to-face meetings, they are also mindful they must not lose the freedom to focus on priority projects by feeling compelled to take on-board too many external views.
“The positive thing from the last year for us has been that it's been much easier to get the firm to coalesce around a few bigger programmes,” she said.
“Before, we were still trying to market too much and trying to keep everybody happy. The results have allowed me to go into the boardroom this past year and say, let's not go backwards in trying to market everything we sell again. Let's actually move forward and say, we can have much more success if we're more focused.”
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“It's been much easier to get the
firm to coalesce around a few
bigger programmes.”
“One thing that will last is the
speed of decision-making.”
Empathy in segmentation
This reorientation of marketing to build more meaningful relationships with customers by focusing on their changing needs is also being seen at the business arm of a high street bank. According to its head of marketing, it became clear during the pandemic that the team had to shift focus from acquisition to customer service to ensure its business clients were being looked after.
It meant she and her team had to adapt their customer segmentation thinking to align with the brand purpose of the bank, supporting users through the good times, as well as the bad. Rather than support clients who were most likely to succeed, the bank had to apply a huge amount of empathy in how it interacted with all customers in every segment.
“We have been looking at where we think we're going to get ‘survive’, ‘thrive’, and ‘declining’ sectors,” she said.
“What's our responsibility to those, because we can't just say we’re [only] going to lend to customers that are thriving? In a purpose-led world, how are we going to support [customers]? A lot of our marketing’s become around support, empathy, expertise and helping customers reskill. If they've gone through furlough to thinking about starting a new business, there are new avenues there about how we inspire people to start a new business.”
Marketing agility
In a year where physical offices were mostly shut, working virtually has meant that old ways are out, and speed is in. Marketers are finding they have the ability to be more nimble and operate at a greater speed, with fewer stakeholders needing to be involved in approval chains.
According to the global head of brand at an insurance company, this improved agility allows marketing to move in new directions at greater pace with checks and balances still in place, but with fewer outside executives needing to be convinced. This is a development she hopes will carry on into 2021, so marketers can carry on working in a more agile way with just the right amount of oversight.
“Sometimes we spend a lot of time putting together business cases for projects. [But now] these have been going at record speed,” she revealed.
“They still have scrutiny to them, but not at the level that people are picking them apart like they normally would. I think just this idea of progress and moving is good because, especially in large organisation like ours, it sometimes does take a while to get things through the system. And I think, hopefully, one thing that will last is just this idea of speed of decision-making. Because sometimes we can be a bit navel-gazing.”
Fewer things done better
With oversight of new proposals tuned down to the point where marketing is accountable but has added agility, there is the additional benefit of focus. With teams working remotely, rather than in large meeting rooms at headquarters, there have been fewer voices seeking to help guide the function’s strategic thinking. These teams have been able to double down on what is truly important.
Trust in the data
This reorientation of the marketing function, to change how it interacts with the rest of the organisation, and the agility in decision-making that has been accelerated by lockdown are leading to new questions being asked in 2021. What to do with this speed and more agile way of engaging with customers?
Jo Pettifer, head of UK and Ireland marketing at Salesforce, believes these are the most fundamental questions marketers will be asking themselves as they transition through this year. While a marketer’s experience will help guide them, the best way to determine where attention is needed is to be led by data and deploy machine learning tools.
“We'll still have a ‘North Star’ of what the required outcomes should look like, but how do we decide what to do, even if it means fewer activities, and how will we know if it’s working?” she asked.
“A fundamental consideration is data accessibility and what we do with it. We found the adoption of machine learning helps us in so many ways to take some of those repetitive tasks away; to be able to predict more accurately about what customers want, and then deliver timely messages. So, there's light at the end of the tunnel.”
There appears to be a growing consensus among marketers that there is no going back to pre-pandemic days of plans being over-scrutinised and too many points of input applied to their execution. This past year has shown that refocusing marketing around changing customer needs was not only possible, but was deliverable at speed when teams were allowed to concentrate on the task.
It is this greater agility, and the realisation that the biggest gains come from doing fewer things better, which underpins the renewed vigour, sharper focus and self-belief marketing teams will be taking into 2021.■
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By Steve Hemsley
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