Integration and Innovation: working together to improve marketing output
The concepts of innovation and adaptation have possibly never been more poignant. After struggling to recover from the disarray of the past couple of years, many businesses are realising that collaboration is necessary to succeed.
All businesses have had to ride the waves recently resulting in priorities, processes and needs having changed for many. COVID led to a raft of unprecedented changes for customers, many of them now permanent, but the launch of a Rescue Situation Room can build resilience, enable customer-centricity, agility, and speed to support both immediate recovery and sustainable growth. It can also elevate the role of marketing by showing its value in driving commercial innovation.
Communication is key, and as those with the know-how on comms, including the latest digitisation and connectivity tools, your marketing team is central to nurturing mutually beneficial relationships across your business ecosystem.
Your marketing team can help your company reconnect with existing clients and partners, whilst uniting with new, all alongside maintaining internal engagement too. The solution lies in keeping conversations alive and providing relevant content (also generated via strategic collaboration) by creating communities both in the real world and online.
In this article, we explore how marketing professionals can create and sustain successful business ecosystems that will aid your business recovery.
Align
Prioritise and synchronise your commercial innovation efforts by working with your marketing team to firstly align key stakeholders. Focus on establishing both internal and external collaborations that will support your organisation’s recovery strategy.
Understand the pros and cons (including monetary costs) of creative collaborations and how marketing activities can support your company to improve and thrive during this period of recuperation. Remember not to overlook the importance of internal marketing and the benefits of connections forged between your marketing team and other departments. Improved engagement, accountability and performance can all result from a common understanding of shared organisational goals, in turn making for a faster, more effective recovery route.
Design
Marketing professionals spearhead a whole host of research, providing invaluable analysis and insight on competitors, trends, and customer behaviours to drive your business forward. This not only inspires future commercial campaigns, but also provides a platform for making critical business and operational decisions.
Marketing data and insight will allow you to identify and focus upon areas where innovation and integration will have the greatest impact. Your Recovery Situation Room should run regular and consistent cycles of market stats and data synthesis, to support your ongoing strategy.
Execute
Moving into the execution stage, internal and external collaboration continues to be vital to the recovery process. With so many organisations having experienced periods of transformation recently, previous rapport cannot be assumed nor taken for granted. It is important to reengage and elevate your brand and creative marketing campaigns are essential.
Consider partnering with industry experts, suppliers and even customers. From sponsorships, online and in-person events, webinars, and podcasts, to interviews, polls and reviews, your marketing team will create and execute cross channel marketing campaigns to help you meet your improvement goals.
Marketing professionals are well-practiced in segmenting audiences and whether looking at external contacts or employees, sending targeted, relevant information is key to building connections and trust; and, in turn, nurturing relationships for future collaborations.
Following the launch and distribution of your commercial campaigns, marketing will continue to capture feedback, measure results, and distil learning to provide further strategic direction.
Iterate
Neither meaningful partnerships or results from marketing activities happen overnight so it is important to have an ongoing plan for undertaking and repeating activities that will engage stakeholders and cultivate relationships for the long-term.
Through responding to results and modifying activities, your marketing team will continue to share learnings across your business, helping you adapt to the market, your customer needs and to tailor your Recovery Situation Room operations.
Many key components of business recovery lie with marketing and there are few departments more critical in developing relationships across your entire ecosystem. Right now, reputation is everything and marketing will lead on brand building and promotion, using the most effective tools and PR methods to maintain and strengthen your place in the market.
If you are looking to grow your marketing team with knowledgeable marketing professionals with the expertise to drive your business and its reputation forward, get in touch with us today.
