Tag: Crisis

The consequences of the coronavirus outbreak have been felt across most nations and economies; a plethora of predictable impacts are expected to affect B2B marketing functions. Marketing leaders and businesses that can predict these impacts on the B2B marketing environment will be better prepared to guide their teams to handle a crisis and challenging economy with speed and the right skills. The areas in which marketing operations teams need to make the most adjustments and improvements to respond to these major impacts are marketing strategies, performance measurement, budget reallocation and control, and optimum reuse of existing assets and resources. So, what are the major disruptions that marketing operation leaders and entrepreneurs need to be prepared for? 4 Marketing Operations Disruptions Marketing Leaders Need to Be Prepared for Most of us across the world are still following social distancing rules, whether voluntarily or imposed by the government. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect the business, economy, and personal lives. There are several long-term impacts on the economy, customers’ lives, and customers’ responses towards marketing campaigns that led to these disruptions in the B2B marketing environment. These are four major disruptions that marketing operations leaders should expect and prepare their team to take the right actions: Changes in ROI Goals: As the worldwide economy is hit and disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of this widespread disruption are expected to continue affecting businesses and targeted customers for the rest of this year and possibly next year. Most organizations have been quick to predict their sales volume – while some businesses have reduced their targets, some have extended the time span when their sales and revenues goals are projected to hit. Many businesses have witnessed growth in demand resulting from the pandemic as it has rippled the need for specific products and services, such as delivery services, e-commerce, safety kits, and many others. Though the major part of forecasting circles around sales, revenue, and budget, marketing functions are also needed to be aligned to generate demand and improve sales pipeline. That’s why marketing operations need to reallocate the budget for the marketing processes that can boost the demand and aid in the sales pipeline. Marketers need to rethink their marketing strategies that can resonate with the targeted audience in disruptive market scenarios. Strategies based on previous sales and marketing success cannot be effective in such situations. Previously Dependable Performance Indicators Will Fail. Marketers need to develop a new set of performance metrics that will correspond to a new set of marketing strategies to deal with radical changes in the economic environment. Some performance indicators that worked in past campaigns will no longer aid marketers in evaluating their present campaigns that were needed to generate prospects and customers amid disruption. Your organization will need metrics such as campaign health scores that combine various factors to indicate product utilization such as people who have expressed interest in specific types of products and services and those who have utilized your products. Many businesses are noticed to perform poorly in some sectors and are deciding to restrict their budget partly or entirely. That includes the travel industry, hospitality industry, retail industry, among others. Is your business also operating in these segments and currently trading poorly, or is your industry noticing a hike in demand like those medical equipment segments or technologies supporting the growing work-from-home workforce? Marketers and leaders need to plan a stipulated time frame to see how their marketing efforts impact the customers, track if conversion rates are working as per the forecast and if marketing operations can work around the warning signs in a challenging economy. Evaluate the Right Segment to Focus On Businesses that are operating in hard-hit segments need to monitor and strategize on how to redirect their attention toward segments that are less likely to be hit by diminishing sales trends during a challenging economy. Portfolio marketers need to start revisiting the targeted audience base and adopt relative targeting practices to identify the segments which are likely to increase sales. Conduct a re-evaluation of market segments based on customer data and dedicate the various roles of marketing operations based on insights collected on those segments. Thus, marketing leaders can enhance their decision-making process. The most useful data ranges to consider to achieve the goal can be segment performance in previous campaigns, ideal customer profiles’ behavioral data, availability of contacts’ job details, and personal contact information in your database. Reallocate Marketing Budgets The marketing budget has been and most likely will continue to get hit by the crisis. The initial phase of changes may have led you to focus on digitally transforming all in-person events and marketing interactions. But as businesses are revising performance targets and priority targeted audiences, they also need to adjust their marketing spend in an enhanced level of the digitized version of marketing efforts for different markets. Leaders also need to prioritize their focus on some segments to generate new leads, nurture, and qualify those leads to improve the sales pipeline. Some businesses also consider focusing their marketing operations toward improving online reputation or toward reactivating existing customers. Considering all these priorities, marketing operations need to shuffle existing budgets to ensure your marketing investments are well-distributed. Next, articulate with your team to share your marketing goals, priorities, and investment. Use this strategic budget allocation strategy to manage your budgeting, marketing processes, and marketing operations teams to make the most use of redistributed investments to target and engage key customer segments and business objectives. Conclusion While making all these revisions and redistributions, marketing operations leaders need to identify key performance metrics according to new visions and plans. We are helping businesses challenged with migration, implementation, and optimization of Marketo to scale their existing marketing strategies for years and businesses trying hard to keep up with the revenue and demand during a challenging economy. In case you need our services in Marketo implementation to scale your process – our certified and automation experts will guide you step by step, once you take the first step to have a chat via chat box at the right below, tell us your requirement via the contact us page, info@marrinadecisions.com or our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. All it takes is a simple ‘Hi’ to take you a long way in scaling your marketing process and targeting thousands of people while saving tons of resources and money in manual processes.
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Marketing Operation Crisis Management: 4 Disruptions to Be Prepared for

The consequences of the coronavirus outbreak have been felt across most nations and economies; a plethora of predictable impacts are expected to affect B2B marketing functions.  Marketing leaders and businesses that can predict these impacts on the B2B marketing environment will be better prepared to guide their teams to handle a crisis and challenging economy […]

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