We’ve discussed this scenario frequently over the past couple years, as inflation rises, profits get squeezed, and economic uncertainty persists. For many businesses, it’s been a story of flat(ish) growth and cost squeezes – and there’s not much change on the horizon.
However, these challenging times often force us to think differently, becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative. After all, you can’t keep doing the same things while expecting better marketing results – change is essential.
After years of “do more with less“, the paradigm is shifting to “do less, better.” Once you’ve implemented incremental gains and built momentum, the paths forward become limited. At this point, you must foster creative thinking to work around having fewer resources while still meeting higher expectations.
These two approaches – efficiency and creativity – work in tandem. When you’ve already trimmed excess, in-housed for efficiencies, and restructured multiple times, stagnation often follows. You reach a point where you can’t do more and can’t cut less. That’s when you must do something different.
You need to find solutions to “get through it”. Success requires resilience, resolve, and consistency. When money is tight, creativity becomes essential – and that creative lens must extend across everything you do to identify those breakthrough opportunities that will drive marketing results.
Technology isn’t the only innovation to focus on
We’re seeing a shift away from investing in new marketing technology, with research identifying that 7/10 CMOs use less than 50% of their tech stack. This negates the ability to ask for more when technical debt is high and they’re not getting the returns required.
The pay-back on technology investments needs to be delivered as scrutiny into spend is higher than ever, so we’re seeing a renewed vigour to connect, integrate and maximise the potential of existing marketing technology investments. For this, you often need fresh thinking, problem solving and deep understanding of the technology architecture. In our conversations with CMOs, this is an area of internal weakness, so there’s some investment required in external partners to create traction to deliver bigger, long term gains.
The only ‘new’ investment is around AI, and even then, marketing leaders are cautious (so far). AI may then also be seen as a business-wide expense versus a marketing expense, depending on how the technology is budgeted, resourced and managed.
For many organisations they’ve looked to AI for that efficiency leap, however it doesn’t drive significant gains – it creates and enables ‘more’, but it doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘better’. You can certainly do more, but standards and quality of execution need a close eye. You can create scale and volume, but with a cautious eye over trust, security and quality.
Campaign structure also drives significant efficiencies
Whilst not a fast solution to driving overall performance, rethinking campaign structure can make a significant impact to the bottom line. Over the last few years we’ve worked with clients to re-engineer media budgets across channels to create efficiencies. Introduced campaigns that work the full funnel to create better engagement and overall sales performance.
The most significant change though has been the shift from lead to account-based approaches. This impacts everything from messaging to campaign structure and sales engagement processes to reporting. It takes time to re-engineer the go-to-market approach but this creates significant change – and impact, as you focus on what really works and reduce the wastage associated with broad demand programmes. Any spare budget then can be reinvested into brand, targeted at discrete and specific audiences creating a longer term impact.
Marginal gains create impact over time
The idea of marginal gains is not new. Sir Dave Brailsford demonstrated the power of marginal gains back in the early 2000s with the British Cycling team. His approach was to review everything and make 1% improvements in all areas. When aggregated, these minor improvements had significant impact – so much so, that the British team won seven out of 10 gold medals in track cycling in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.
The concept has been applied to business too – not for the first time I’m sure, but Sir Dave, who also holds an MBA, has spent time applying the methodology to other industries.
The same is true in marketing. As an industry, testing is not new, but we know the impact of a 1% increase in conversion rate (or we should). Take that to a new level and apply the process across all facets from budgeting, campaign performance, time and so on, and you can suddenly see a sharp increase in performance (without too much pain).
Create your own shift
These types of shifts are significant in terms of operations, upskilling and demonstrating return. There’s also the need for an unwavering belief that it will work and deliver what the business needs: lower cost and better results. For that you need to trust the process, leverage creating thinking, problem solving and take an iterative approach to knowing that you’re on the right track.
The last few years has seen budgets chipped away or change forced with radical restructures. To make that impact over the coming years and meet business targets head on, thinking time, innovation and bright ideas are a must.
