Adapt or Fall Behind: Evaluating When to Pivot Marketing Strategies

Deciding to pivot marketing strategies can be a tough call. You don’t want to make changes too quickly — before you have sufficient data —,  but you also don’t want to fall behind on sales before making a strategy change. With competitors, platforms and market demands constantly changing, it’s difficult to know when to adapt.

“Regardless of whether you are pacing behind or ahead of goal, marketers in all disciplines should always be reviewing and optimizing their plans at a micro level (i.e., analyzing offers, iterative testing, creative testing, targeting and segmentation analysis and testing),” said SA Director of Data, Research & Insights, Emily Bussiere. “The total strategy shifts should be reserved for when sales are falling significantly behind plan, and you need to make a broader change to the entire plan to get back on track.”

If an organization is looking for new business opportunities, Bussiere recommends considering these four questions first:

• What is your key differentiator or value proposition that distinguishes you from competitors?

• Who are your best customers?

• Who is your competition and how are they responding to the market?

• What is the current state of demand in your industry based on the current state of the economy?

The important thing to keep in mind with these considerations is the answers to these questions will help develop a foundational strategy for growth. Performing a customer and competitor analysis will uncover who your best customers are and how your competition is responding to the current market conditions. By researching and assessing the current economic climate, you’ll be able to gain new insights on the new customer journey for your target market.

Additionally, you’ll learn about new avenues you can leverage and new channel options to connect with customers. You may be surprised by the number of old channels you thought were irrelevant but are still important components of the customer journey in the current marketing landscape.

To draw in more customers in the early stages of their journey, assess your marketing mix. Often times, there is a tendency to lean too heavily into lower funnel tactics, especially when KPIs are focused on conversions. However, the best long-term strategy includes a mixture of upper, mid and lower funnel tactics so you are walking alongside consumers, even in the early discovery phase of their journey. When demand slows in the market, a smart strategy can be to focus on upper and mid-funnel strategies to help increase your brand awareness, steal market share from competitors, and possibly move consumers more quickly toward conversion. And as always, measure everything and continually test and learn along the way.

Bussiere recommends assessing what is working and what isn’t. “While the customer journey and marketing touchpoints are becoming increasingly complex due to digital landscapes, there are still parts of your marketing strategy that are working. Identify your strengths and pull insights that can be applied throughout your marketing goal,” she said.

Whether you’re making big changes to your plans mid-year or building your marketing strategies and analysis from the ground up, SA is here to help. SA’s Data, Research, & Insights team leverages data to understand audiences, measure performance, and optimize results to grow businesses. The SA team can build attribution models, produce custom reporting, analyze campaign performance, and conduct customer analysis to provide innovative solutions to all clientele. Bring your company goals to us so we can help you grow your business.

Emily Bussiere is Director of Data, Research & Insights at Strategic America. Learn more about our services.