Generally, every Marketer in an established company is aware of competition from disruptors due to their dynamic marketing methods. Senior leadership of these organisations are demanding that their marketing be more agile and entrepreneurial.
But it’s clearly easier said than done with bureaucracy, slow methods and ingrained company culture proving to be obstacles that make change exceptionally difficult.
Here we look at the top three reasons why larger organisations are losing out to disruptors and how they can adapt to compete more effectively.
1. Survival of the fastest
To date, 2020 has been a year of uncertainty and change. One area is acceleration of digitisation. In the Deloitte CMO 2020 survey, Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings at 85%.
So if the customer mindset is there, why don’t we all rush out testing new products or services with new potential customers?
Sometimes past success can hold companies back. Relying on size and scale of reach would provide success, but speed is now absolutely crucial to success.
Speed to market. Speed to react to customers. Speed through the pipeline.
Unfortunately, big companies may mean big resources but that also means big teams and big bureaucracy and that all adds up to a very slow process. Add larger marketing agencies into the mix and the process is slowed down even further.
To be as fast as is needed in today’s marketplace, you have to understand how to streamline the entire marketing process. Speed is required at every stage from decision making to implementation, strategy to execution.
Digital leaders understand that thoughtfully considered strategic bets based on expected business outcomes and digital levers must be the organisation’s focus. However, senior leadership are looking to use a start-experiment-learn-iterate route to breakthrough solutions instead of waiting for certainty before moving ahead. Using certain tools — such as lean startup, minimum viable product and data-evidence-based experimentation — organisations can leverage experimentation as a path to new successes while reducing negative risks.
2. It’s not personal
Larger companies can be surprisingly deaf to what their clients want, rigid in their offering, unresponsive to changing demands and often lose touch with their customers as they target their messages to attract the widest possible market.
However, consumers don’t all have the same needs or desires. By marketing to a perceived demographic without truly understanding them, brands ignore the needs of prospects who require more specific messaging and information.
One case in point is a sustainable energy provider in London called Bulb.
The founders of Bulb had a disruptive vision for the business.
“When we started Bulb in the UK, we saw the same story at all the big providers – poor service, high tariffs, inefficiency and little support for renewables,” chief executive Hayden Wood told a conference in London today.
You don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist to work that out, but a Marketer should be obsessed with what the customer wants to see, feel and hear. They must listen to clients, use tools to see what they are reacting well to and customise everything they can. It’s often as simple as listening to their issues and providing them with a personalised, considered and effective solution.
This should resonate throughout the pipeline and not just at the top. Create value-added and pre-approved materials well in advance so you have sales tools ready and waiting when your sales team needs them and when a customer will be most responsive to them.
3. Ineffective campaigns
This last point is perhaps the hardest to correct as there are so many elements involved in the creation of a campaign and content. Once again, we will focus on the three main reasons:
Mis-managed marketing and sales
We’ll start with a classic and a topic we have experienced many times. The age-old tale of the disconnect between Marketing and Sales departments.
For marketers, their campaign success relies on the sales department converting the prospect. Yet, when customers aren’t converted the blame can trickle down to the marketing team.
It’s understandable as a lot of time and budget are put into marketing, and CEOs and CFO want to see an ROI.
But instead of slashing the budget, we believe in aligning sales and marketing from the very beginning, so that they have common goals, equal accountability and improved communication that will ensure a much higher percentage of leads are converted.
In every Campaign Accelerator kick off workshop we have done, we have insisted that a senior member of the sales team is present.
Lack of creativity
Many companies are now so focused on what all the data is telling them that it restricts creativity.
For us, it is about creating the perfect balance. Creativity must work in conjunction with the data. Your campaign must raise awareness and change perception. It must build the brand and generate leads.
In a cluttered, confused and uncertain market, the need for stand out creativity that stands for something has never been higher.
To save client’s time and budget and to ensure no scope creep for our agency, we use three separate teams to create the campaign concept. The client has always been able to choose one of the three campaigns to develop further. This has saved time, budget and, most crucially, ideas are not whittled down into a bland ‘designed by committee’ concepts.
Non optimised campaigns
When the average person sees over 11,000 digital ads every month, the waste in media spend is clearly enormous. It’s no surprise that big organisations are the main culprits when it comes to not optimising their marketing campaigns the way they should.
This leads to campaigns with less impact on visitors, an increase in customer acquisition costs and leaves a gap that smaller, more focussed businesses can take advantage of.
Disruptors and start-ups have to watch every cent spent on their digital campaigns and there is no reason larger corporations shouldn’t do the same. A well targeted, highly optimised and diligently run campaign will undoubtedly lower CAC and increase LTV.
The Campaign Accelerator
Over the years, we’ve worked with excellent marketers who were restricted by some, if not all, of these issues. When working at global agencies we were also a part of the problem.
Now at Switch Creative, we’re able to provide the strategy, creativity and execution using our many years of large agency experience but with the speed and agility needed in today’s marketplace.
Our all in one solution, The Campaign Accelerator, allows established companies to act like start-ups, getting their go to market campaigns out in weeks rather than months.
Find out more by visiting
https://www.campaign-accelerator.com/