Marketing Matters Now More Then Ever!

*Article by Forbes

It’s time to reclaim marketing as a key driver of business. Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.” Clearly most business leaders embrace innovation as the lifeblood of their companies today, but lately marketing has been relegated to a staff-driven, cost center by many.  And that has caused waste, missed opportunities, and failure for many businesses.

Marketing as it was originally intended, in its fullest, truest, and greatest form, is more important today than ever before.  The world is awash in innovative products, services, technologies, solutions, business models, etc. today.  These new offerings must be brought to market and commercialized in order to generate revenue and profit.  Innovation alone cannot sustain a company; it must be paired with marketing.

The Decline of Marketing

Instead of being led and valued as a driver of business viability and growth, marketing has stagnated in recent years.  Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey shows that marketing budgets have leveled off to an average of 11% of company revenue, packaged goods companies including Unilever and P&G have scaled back their marketing spending, and companies from media groups such as Warner Bros. to retailers like Walmart and Starbucks have been cutting marketing staff.

Pundits have been declaring “marketing is dead” for nearly a decade now but predictions of marketing’s demise have increased with recent developments including the growth of artificial intelligence.  AI assistants are expected to use algorithms and predictive analytics to offer up information, goods, and services to customers – which suggests that marketing will have increasingly less impact on their decisions. The growth in number and market share of Amazon’s private label brands is another development that also seems to challenge the effectiveness of other companies’ marketing.  And those who worship at the temple of innovation believe that marketing is the cost you have to pay when your product is inferior.

So it’s not surprising that companies are cutting back on marketing.  Marketing as we’ve known it in recent years has lost its power and will likely continue to decline.  But if business leaders want to thrive in today’s cluttered, competitive, commoditizing marketplace, they need to unleash the powerful potential of marketing.

Innovation Needs Marketing

In a recent Harvard Business Review issue, two separate articles explained the importance of marketing in today’s innovation-fueled marketplace.  Although the first article intended to promote a new sales approach, it ultimately made the case for marketing.  Business school professors Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne observed, “Senior leaders have great confidence in their ability to develop innovations but not in their ability to commercialize them.”

The writers explained that breakthrough new products, unlike existing or incrementally better ones, require more intense and extensive engagement with customers.  Whereas curiosity might fuel customers’ interest in a groundbreaking innovation early on, they are much more likely to be uncertain and raise doubts later in the sales cycle as they consider how their business and they themselves might need to change to adopt it.

As a result, the professors suggested sales teams develop a psychological profile of the ideal customer – those who are more adaptable, those whose organizational culture supports learning and change, etc.  And they said the training salespeople receive about a new offering should be less about its bells and whistles and more about the evaluation criteria that customers are likely to apply to it.  The marketing function enables both of these.

Marketing is about connecting the right customers to the right product.  Marketing helps sales teams, and people throughout the company, think from the outside-in about what is being offered, convey its value in customer-centric ways, and persist through barriers that can only be addressed through deep customer knowledge and insight.  The article’s authors concluded that new-to-the-world products require transformation in the organization that offers the innovation as much as the one that buys it.  Unleashing the full power of marketing is critical to achieving that transformation.

The IMD professors who wrote the second article also support the need for inventiveness in establishing and deploying novel offerings.  “Executives recognize that to devise ingenious innovations, they must break paradigms and shift mindsets,” they observed.  “But when it comes to delivery, they often lapse into standard ways of thinking.”

They contrasted the failure of the Sony Reader to the “technically inferior but hugely successful” Amazon Kindle to explain the importance of go-to-market strategies to the success of new product launches.  All the creativity that went into the development of the Reader “was undone by a lack of originality in execution,” they explained.  The new product depended upon content but Sony didn’t enlist the book publishing industry as an ally.  “Sony engineered an elegant device,” they authors concluded, “but Amazon designed an original solution.” And they went on to discuss how the way an idea is framed affects how people perceive its value. “Filmless photography” was a limiting way to introduce to customers Kodak’s first digital camera and a threatening way to describe it in the Kodak organization itself.

The marketing function can and should overcome such challenges.  Marketing involves considering and addressing the entire customer experience, it provides the right context for people to understand the innovation, and it helps identify new partners and channels necessary to engage with customers at the right place, time, and manner.

Both articles make clear marketing’s essential role in the innovation process.

Marketing Is Misunderstood

If marketing is so critical to business today, why is it overlooked or undervalued by so many?  The way marketing has come to be defined and executed is to blame.  Marketing has been reduced to customer acquisition and retention.  These days, what most people consider marketing is really simply advertising.  Search, email, content, and other common forms of marketing today are primarily methods for generating or maintaining awareness or repeat purchase.  They are the “announcements and persuasive messages” referred to in the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) definition of advertising, and their intent is to “inform and/or persuade” people.

But marketing is supposed to be so much more than this.  Marketing didn’t get its start in the “Mad Men” era with creative directors dreaming up catchy jingles and persuasive copy to induce purchases.  It was born out of the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturers needed to develop products that would appeal to customers and to find ways to engage customers with them.  The AMA’s definition of marketing reflects the function’s foundational role to business:  Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Marketing, therefore, needs to be less about what happens after an innovation is ready to launch, and more about getting it to be ready in the first place — by creating a new market or expanding an existing one; developing or understanding how it will fit into customers’ needs, wants, values, and lives; and building a customer experience that turns the offering into a complete customer solution.  And marketing needs to be less defined by a budget and managed by a department, and more embraced as a business discipline throughout the organization.

As business continues to be driven by innovation in 2019 and beyond, marketing must be embraced, developed and valued more than ever.

Do websites still matter in 2023?

In 2023, having a website is going to matter more than ever. The internet has become an integral part of our lives and the importance of having a strong online presence cannot be overstated. A website is essentially the digital face of your brand and it is often the first point of contact for potential customers. With more and more people turning to online sources for information and shopping, your website is going to be the key to your success. A well-designed and user-friendly website can help you build credibility and trust with your target audience. It can also provide a platform for you to showcase your products or services, engage with your customers, and generate leads. In short, having a website is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for any business looking to succeed in 2023 and beyond.

If you are one of the many people questioning a website and how it can help scale your business, contact us to get a head start on your digital footprint.

19th Designs The Sky Isnt The Limit

Why SMS Marketing is useful

Reasons why you should consider text message marketing as part of your customer communications

As more brands look to target customers on the move, SMS is becoming an increasingly essential part of effective multi-channel marketing. However, with few digital marketing agencies featuring SMS as a core offering, their clients are potentially missing out on communications with customers and increased ROI.

Organisations mistakenly believe that mobile marketing requires heavy investment in apps and does not allow for personalised, targeted communication and lacks strong analysis to support ROI. The reality is that access to mobile communications is far easier than perceived and gaining access to mobile consumers (smartphone and non-smartphone) can be as simple as sending a personalised, targeted text message. The means to instigate two-way SMS messaging between a company and their mobile users is essential to building a brand in households around the world provided consumer privacy is protected through legal requirements for opt-in.

In this post we will summarise the key findings from our latest whitepaper which we explain in our webinar on The benefits of using SMS in your marketing mix and discuss why SMS should be used in a communications mix as well as looking at how it can be used as part of a multi-channel strategy for engaging with customers across the customer lifecycle.

1. It’s a direct, immediate channel

SMS is one of the most immediate channels available; with a read rate of 97% within 15 minutes delivery, you can be reassured that your time critical messages will be read almost instantly. A significant 45% of SMS campaigns generate a successful ROI, reaching over 50% when combined with other popular channels such as email and social media.

2. You can use shortcodes to simplify response and build your database

Have your customers make the first move by adding a shortcode or keyword to print collateral, advertisements and advertising boards as well as social media. This strategy means that customers soon become familiar with a brand’s code and keyword and are therefore more likely to interact and respond.

3. It can support and integrate with other channels

It is important that all channels work well together within the marketing mix and SMS is no exception. SMS is a great standalone channel, however it also has the ability to enhance and support other marketing mediums, such as social media and email.

As well as being great on its own, SMS can also function to enhance and support other popular mediums among consumers, such as social media and email.

For example they can serve to remind customers to read an email sent by a brand hours or even days before. A simple follow up SMS asking “have you read our email?” can help increase email open rates by 20%–30%.

4. You can learn more about your customers

SMS is a great channel to get feedback from your customers via surveys. Research shows that on average 31% of consumers will respond to a survey via SMS with the average response time for users being just over 5 minutes. Meaning you can get great results in a short period of time.

5. You can increase customer engagement

Think of SMS as a way to enhance how your brand engages with your customers across the entire customer lifecycle. Businesses should remember to vary the type of content they send out – while customers may value updates and news on forthcoming developments within the brand, this information is best delivered via email where longer, more creative messaging is more appropriate.

Although marketers may feel that texting is invasive, many consumers are now familiar with text from when using local services like dentists, garages or hairdressers or public services like the NHS. This is a great example of how the NHS is engaging its audience in an admittedly high-engagement occasion!

Additionally, brands can use texting for more immediate, expected sales-related offers such as vouchers, discounts, promotions or even birthday messages.

6. Response data enables you to monitor, track and improve

Tracking meaningful ROI, identifying customers engaging via text message and monitoring delivery rates are all possible through SMS revealing the realities to the misconception of SMS being an untrackable channel and bringing it more in line with what has been possible with email for years.

By using these analytics, businesses can create further targeted campaigns and continually build a better understanding of their mobile database. Not only does it mean they save money and improve ROI but by profiling and segmenting out numbers that are least likely to respond, SMS allows a company to target those customers via email or another channel.