How Can Strategic Marketing Help You Grow Your Organization in 2021?

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How is strategic marketing changing? How are brands having greater impact on their many stakeholders? Last week I attended Reuter’s Strategic Marketing USA event. This event gave me an opportunity to look at how successful brands are evolving to overcome current challenges.

In two days, we had over 40 of the world’s best marketing executives sharing their ideas and strategies on what’s working today and moving into the future. These marketers are successfully seizing new opportunities for growth and impact in their markets. Let me share my observations on the first half day of the program.

Focusing on soft values delivers hard results for their organizations. Their presentations  focused on how they are creating a more responsive, action oriented culture that moves quickly.

They feel energized by this current opportunity. I saw several patterns emerging in their shared experiences. In spite of all the challenges, these organization are not only surviving but thriving in these uncertain times.

Most marketers previously thought remote teams don’t work. Brand leaders believe in person interactions between team members are critical to a developing a vibrant, thriving brand. Few leaders are willing to try this in their organizations. Today most feel its transformed collaboration. 

Their remote teams have learned how to adapt and adopt to new situations very quickly. Many feel their teams are better able to work together on projects. The have better team dynamics and they’re getting great results. Few teams members are willing to go back to the way it was.  

Learn how to get more out of your remote teams using The Ultimate Guide to Managing Remote Marketing Teams.

What is the purpose of your organization? Seems simple doesn’t it. Successful organizations today have reconnected to their purpose. They found the clearer their purpose, the easier it is to make decisions on where to invest time and resources to have the greatest impact.

Purpose provides clarity and the ability to see what you should be doing. It empowers people across the organization to make better decisions faster. This allows them to focus on how to leverage their strengths and capabilities for greatest impact on the many stakeholders.

Courage comes from knowing what you do is the best solution for customer and various stakeholders. It reengages your teams in a quest to provide superior experience for your customers.

Kevin Peck, SVP – AT&T Brand Strategy, Design and Management, underscored that idea of courage in his presentation at the  Reuter’s Strategic Marketing USA event.  He shared his perspectives on the future of brands, talking about purpose and a serving leadership culture.

Successful strategic marketing organizations focus on people, not technology first. All of these organizations are engaged in their clients’ lives. They learned what was happening, navigating out of curiosity when dealing with customers’ new needs arising from the pandemic.

The successful organizations were able to empower their people to find out how things were changing. Not only through firsthand investigation but also by looking at the data with their eye on sharing their critical findings with all the stakeholders involved.

New opportunities and increasing customer intimacy provide insights that in the past may have taken years to uncover. Today it takes weeks, allowing for a more flexible approach to working with others. Our marketers understand they are transforming our society in real time.

This leads to more opportunities to increase partnerships with customers. As the pandemic became more serious, these organizations understood that there needs to be increased trust with their customers. Many also discovered a resistance to new ideas. Trust has to be earned.

They found potential opportunities for growth as Accenture outlines in Finding New Growth in a Time of Crisis.

These new deeper relationships require a higher level of transparency that had been in place in the past. In some cases, their customers were not fighting for sales, but in the case of several industries, survival of their organizations. To keep some businesses afloat, their suppliers had to transfer new capabilities to customers to ensure survival.

Many times, it requires organizations to  make tough financial decisions to choose the long term over the short term. Helping customers to create their business to meet the new conditions in their markets. The courage to say we are here for you in markets that didn’t, previously, do business this way.

Many organizations leverage influencers to increase trust with their best customers. I wrote recently wrote this article talking about how organizations will leverage influencer marketing in the 2021.

I shared my thoughts on influencer marketing and social media trends at the Strategic Marketing USA event last week. Here’s what I saw on the role of influencer marketing in your 2021 marketing strategy How do you get the most out of your influencer marketing in 2021? 

Remote access provides these organizations with its own set of challenges. Even today many older organizations are learning how to accelerate the rate of change in their markets.

Connectivity and collaboration by leveraging new technology requires a new skill set and technology infrastructure to support a business environment where we can’t interact with people in person.

Break down of global supply chains coupled with consumer fears created many challenges for organizations to create new synergies between a wide range of suppliers and partners. They had to become the voice of their customers with many different government organizations and financial service organizations.

What are your organization’s values? What role does your organization play in society? The bigger picture continues to drive many organizations’ decisions. How do you communicate your values to your many stakeholders?

Your customers want to know where you stand on many issues. It’s not enough to provide a great product or service.  Today it’s critically important to say what your brand stands for.

If the pandemic was not enough of a challenge for organizations, we also have a increasing call for social justice and equality. Many people are mobilized as many protests break out in the streets.

Over 60% of your customers want their brands to be involved in society’s bigger issues. Customers expect, or should I say demand, organizations to get involved. Now!

Start this discussion with your team by sharing Marketing in the Age of Resistance.

Emotions run high on both sides of the issues. A contentious election and economic uncertainty has made for a volatile mix. Organizations struggle as the traditional brand history of many has been called into question. Successful organizations changed, made tough decisions, and continue to prosper.

This means organizations have to decide what they stand for. How do they support their causes, how do they mobilize their respective brands to be the change they want to see in the world?

What does your organization do with these new rules of strategic marketing? 2020 is going to be one of the most transformational years in history. Successful brands and organizations discovered a new way of impacting our society. How can you adapt to these new rules of marketing?

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of articles talking about how brands have successfully navigated in these new times and what you can do.  We’ll talk about how brands implement new programs to meet the changing and sometimes challenging business environment.

To give you some ideas as you wait check out 5 Trends in Strategic Marketing that transform your brands in 2021.

See you next week.