Roll back the clock to August 2008, dial up the marketing spend and ignore any signs of an economic slowdown while riding a padded sales pipeline. Fast forward to August 2009. Compare notes.
What were we doing before? If effective, metric-driven marketing is the new catchphrase that would mean we weren’t measuring and weren’t effective. No wonder so many had a devil of a time defending wasteful budgets.
Are you left scratching your head? Even the most green of marketing professionals knows that an economic slowdown spells trouble. Marketing is a cost center. Even product development slips when cash dries up.
VLG has the benefit of a different perspective as an interactive solutions provider. We get to hear different strategies, different pain points, and different challenges faced by our customers. Our catbird seat makes for great trend spotting.
Although marketing challenges appear unchanged, marketers are changing. Some are changing quickly, some slowly, but I’m not sure who wins. Take a look at the top three trends spotted by VLG.
1. Don’t go it alone.
2. Measure everything and sift through the numbers later.
3. Experiment with social media.
Creative Commons: Project Gutenberg
You can’t go it alone and we’re seeing a heavy reliance on channel partner and VAR relationships this year and going forward. Remember, VLG spends most of its time in the B2B space. Shared, co-branded marketing programs are on the rise, but the coordination costs of turning those efforts into quantifiable results is a massive hurdle for most.
Get all the data you can, but don’t forget to take action. In the airline business they have cockpit distractions. They are those little things that distract you from “flying” the plane, which may cause you to fly way, way off course. Intuition tells you that the more data you have the easier to chart your course, but the trend seems to point in a different direction. Grab behavior stats, find pain points, qualify decision makers and close deals. Get numbers, but don’t get bogged down in them.
Finally, folks playing around with social media walk a fine line between acquired knowledge and wasted time. You have to learn how to apply one and you can’t get the other back. You should follow us on Twitter. We walk the line.
We need to maximize the impact of our marketing spend today, tomorrow and the next day. If the measure of marketings effectiveness is budget, in 2009 companies had little faith in marketing. Budget cuts do not 100% correlate to marketing effectiveness, but it gives the CFO an easy target.
When working your way through this recession take notes. You’ll need them for the next downturn.
