Marketing trends 2023: The future of customer obsession
The top marketing trends for 2023 are all about zeroing in on the customer with the right data and insights to drive effective engagement.
We tend to associate scalability with enterprise technology, specifically with putting in place an IT architecture that can grow concurrently with the demands from the business. But scalability also is a highly relevant quality for marketing.
What is scalable marketing?
Scalable marketing is the ability of an organization to generate more leads, opportunities, and revenue without significant increases in resources. Scalable marketing approach is used by organizations to increase sales volume either by maintaining or boosting marketing’s operational efficiency. Scalable marketing is not the same as growth marketing.
Top marketing leaders focus on scalable marketing by implementing processes, nurturing talent, and using technology that drive business growth, grow customer loyalty and increase resilience.
Marketers must be able to engage anywhere. That makes delivering unified omnichannel customer engagement, at scale, non-negotiable.
Show me the money: How scalable marketing processes support growth
Marketing is often seen as creative, requiring “flair” and a free flow of ideas. While that’s certainly true, as your marketing organization grows, you need to put in place robust and scalable processes that can:
- Prevent errors
- Ensure standard practices are followed
- Enable you to achieve your marketing objectives across a growing number of market segments, target geographies or ever-expanding product/service portfolios.
At a granular level, it’s important to identify gaps in processes that are causing delays, pain points or frustrations. Our Retail Roadblocks report uncovered, for example, that the biggest roadblock to personalization is the inability to scale content.
A third of retail marketers surveyed said they struggled to repurpose content to meet their personalization goals across different channels and found it impossible to run effective personalization campaigns.
Incremental improvements (process iteration) and automation are some typical answers to the challenge of rigid processes – or absence of processes.
In 2023, customer loyalty dropped 13%.
In 2024, it fell by 10%.
Is your brand retaining – or repelling – customers? Get the data + details on how to keep consumers loyal in this REPORT.
Retaining + growing marketing talent amid challenging budgets
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before. According to Gartner, 33% of marketing work has now moved to in-house teams.
What was previously done by agencies with loads of employees must now be done by a lean, internal team. At the same time, a tough economy is putting marketing budgets at risk.
There’s no easy solution to this complex challenge, but one answer may be linked to the processes argument outlined above. According to a Cambridge Judge Business School article, “standard practices bring professionalism.”
By introducing them, companies allow employees to focus on adding value to support business goals.
Having repeatable marketing workflows and standard practices also means that new hires can pick up tasks quickly and that parts of your marketing engine can be more easily outsourced (budget permitting) as your company grows.
Another talent-related challenge is posed by the ongoing Great Resignation, which makes it increasingly hard to find and retain talented marketing pros. While this could be seen as a negative, it could in fact be a good opportunity to expand recruiting beyond traditional marketing graduate applications, which tend to come from non-diverse backgrounds.
As the industry becomes more inclusive, marketing as a whole will benefit from a much wider talent pool.
HR trends 2024: Melding humanity and hybrid work to retain top talent
HR trends 2024 are all about putting people first by improving the employee experience, humanizing management, and getting hybrid work right.
Advanced tech drives efficiency, opens up new channels
Finally, technology is possibly the single biggest enabler of a scalable marketing organization.
The right technology will allow you to do more with less and drive the quality and efficiency of all aspects of your marketing operation, from demand generation, lead nurturing, data management, customer loyalty programs to content production.
Sophisticated, unified solutions empower marketers with more time, more understanding and ultimately a greater business impact.
The use of AI will play a key role, automating the most time-consuming elements of the marketing role and executing repeatable tasks.
Technology also opens up new channels for engagement. Conversation channels like WhatsApp, for example, are a compelling way to meet customers where they are with the content that they want.
Ultimately, a technology-driven, scalable marketing organization will support your company’s expansion by allowing you to stay close to your customers and drive more engagement, retention, and customer loyalty.
