6 Strategies to Help You Future Proof Your Marketing Efforts

Businesses have had to pivot a lot these past 2 years, learn how to future proof your marketing during the most complicated times with these 6 tips.

Image Source: Pexels

If the past couple of years have taught us anything it’s that the business climate is in a state of almost constant flux.

While many aspects of business need to adapt with times there are some things that stay pretty constant even in marketing. Your marketing is certainly one of the most challenging areas in this regard. We’ve seen the priorities of your target demographic change quit dramatically since the start of COVID. If you’ve found it difficult to make sure your messaging connects with your audience, there might be some foundational elements that need attention. 

We’re going to take a look at 6 of these strategies that will help you future proof your marketing efforts and how can you practically implement them? 

1) Prioritize Quality

An essential part of keeping your marketing future-proof is an understanding of its value. Unless the materials and tactics represent value to the audience, they quickly become irrelevant and outdated. The best way to achieve this is through making quality a priority in all the content and materials you produce. Sure, it can sometimes be tempting to put out superficial quick-win pieces that take advantage of trends. But this generally isn’t the route to long-term engagement.

Quality is key to future-proof your marketing. The key to quality content is largely about making sure your demographic continually finds your content useful in some form. This means regularly creating items to help your audience answer questions or solve problems. Your content could be directly related to the use of your products or providing the benefit of your professional expertise on relevant subjects. Make certain all claims are backed by credible independent sources.

2) Risk Management

Changes in the commercial landscape and public life can be disruptive to various areas of your business. In turn, this can negatively impact the continued efficacy of your marketing campaigns. Often your best defense against this is working to raise your awareness of potential issues ahead of time and preparing accordingly.

As such, creating a robust risk identification and management strategy can help you mitigate potential disruption. This should include examination of the presence of the basic physical, human, and financial risks directly related to your marketing and those with a wider impact on the company as a whole. As the world progresses, many of the hazards that could threaten the efficacy of your marketing are likely to be technological.   

Remember, risks can change. As such, you need to make risk assessments a regular part of your company and marketing department activities. Involve risk assessment contractors if you don’t feel able to approach this personally. 

3) Stakeholder Mapping

Marketing isn’t just about pushing your brand ideas and values toward the public. Rather, it’s a form of communication that considers and benefits from the perspectives of various parties. To achieve any kind of longevity with your marketing you need to adopt strategies to learn about the various people interacting with your business.

Stakeholder mapping is an effective tool to visualize how each party plays a role in a project or your overall business. From a marketing perspective, this is likely to be executives, marketing team members, consumers, and investors. The mapping process solidifies insights into the priorities these influencers have at each stage of the marketing journey. 

When performed regularly, your marketing professionals get a good sense of how these priorities are changing. You can then ascertain how campaigns and materials need to be adapted to suit the current state of the stakeholder ecosystem.

4) Identify Relevant Platforms

Success in digital marketing relies on a combination of methods. But this doesn’t mean you should engage with all technological platforms equally. This is a good way to waste a lot of capital and fail to afford the most attention to your target demographic. As such, future-proofing your marketing efforts can revolve around identifying the most relevant platforms to use.

This is often as simple as performing frequent market research. There is an increasing amount of data available on what demographics tend to favor different platforms, whether email, podcast content, or specific social media channels. But it’s just as important to check the analytics of the platforms you currently use, as this can not only tell you what is effective but give early warnings of drop-off rates in engagement.

However, perhaps your most important method of making certain your business is prepared for the future is just interacting with your consumers. Have conversations over your social media channels with them about what platforms they actually enjoy using. Establish why they head to specific types of information and particularly what they find ineffective. Listen to them, make it clear you care about their opinions. This can help to keep you on track.

5) Review Regularly

Marketing methods are rarely static. A surefire way to make sure your approach isn’t future-proof is finding one method that gives you some success and sticking with it. Your business should be treated as a living, breathing organism. It grows and develops and your efforts should grow with it. To stay on top of this, you need to perform regular reviews. 

This can be spearheaded by the marketing department itself. Involve each staff member in assessing the current methods being utilized and how they are serving the demographic. The diversity of staff you use here will provide you with different viewpoints on areas being missed and new opportunities for engagement.

With this in mind, it’s also worth getting outside perspectives. Engage with business analytics and data analytics experts to examine how your past and current marketing fits in with your business goals. Many analysts use artificial intelligence platforms to more effectively examine the full range of data from your business and provide you with practical insights. You can use these to inform the future direction of your efforts.

6) Be Consistent

Though it’s wise to be cognizant of the potential for change, consistency has a place in future-proofing your marketing, too. This isn’t about using the same old voices to create content that becomes stale. Rather, it’s about managing your demographic’s expectations so they stick with you in the long term.

This is likely to involve building a regular schedule to post your content. Audiences like to know when the brands they value are going to provide content they want to engage with. From a brand experience perspective, it helps to make your business a solid part of their lives.

But one of the most important areas of consistency is the values you exhibit in your content. To drive engagement now and in the future, your demographic needs to know they can keep trusting you. You can’t hop on cultural bandwagons because the hashtag happens to be trending. Audiences don’t have patience for this kind of inauthentic and cynical marketing. Consistently demonstrate your commitment to your true values and if you feel a need to change, be transparent about your reasons for this and build it into your long-term marketing plan.

Conclusion

The future is uncertain for most enterprises. But you can help make sure your marketing efforts are protected by adopting a range of strategies. If you want to future proof your marketing strategy start by making quality content a priority and continually learning about the impact of your stakeholders. Some solid risk management and a commitment to consistency in your values can also keep your efforts on track. None of these elements are single-use. It takes regular effort and attention to keep your marketing relevant and engaging.