12 months into helping companies with their marketing challenges.
The challenges, the learning and the opportunities ahead!
It has been just over one year now since starting Beachside Marketing and it has been an amazing journey. Ones of highs and lows, for sure.
A few years ago, a wonderful founder of a start-up that I was in, mentioned that one of the biggest learnings for people in switching into and establishing a new business is not to expect a straight-line – Beachside Marketing’s journey has not been a straight line!
Beachside has been so lucky to work with some wonderful clients - namely Ticker, Age UK, R-cubed Kingston University and the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation over the past year. I can honestly say, each has been so rewarding.
The projects have been fascinating and align with what we had hoped Beachside Marketing would be supporting; passionate organisations with marketing challenges that needed to be addressed in a flexible and adaptable way.
It was also amazing that each of these opportunities was introduced to me via friends, colleagues, or those within my network - so I must a big thank you to all of you, you know who you are.
Each project made me use different aspects of my experience, from across my career to date but at the same time, develop new knowledge and insights - underlining the need to keep your knowledge up to speed, refreshing your perspective and being open to listening and learning every day.
Balancing your life. My family and my business.
2022 was challenging. At times I could feel myself, as I can do, getting absolutely absorbed with each business, its challenge, and the aims of its people.
I love what I do, I love marketing and these organisations are each on an important mission, where they are casting their brightness and innovation across each of their very varied sectors.
It is important to keep a check on what your brief is and adapt your style for each piece of work…but still be true to who you are.
Crikey where to start? The curveball.
Personally, the loss of my gorgeous Dad towards the end of the year had the hugest impact in 2022 – unsurprisingly. The long period of support before that day was so challenging, the calls, the visits, the discussions on a whole range of topics (none of which we were well practised in). This set a real challenge in the need to continue to strike the balance – for you, your family, your colleagues and your business – it was very incredibly hard.
Trying to continue a focus on Beachside as a new business and our projects across this period was challenging, but it also enabled me to have an ‘out’, and one that worked for me and helped get me through it.
It will always be family first. I would do it all again at a moment's notice, but it was very tough to achieve and maintain a balance and apply your focus in the way that fits best, you.
The biggest challenge was managing your own wellness (so important and often overlooked) alongside supporting your own immediate and larger family, and maintaining your client needs with your professional standards. So difficult.
2023 continues with broader challenges but the incredible support that has been offered across such times stays with you. I hope to be able to pass it on to others when the time comes.
It was and is one of the most difficult periods of my life. I am so lucky to have the people around me that have got me through it.
People always amaze me.
It is the individuals within the businesses that continue to always light the way in my eyes. The opportunity to connect with the array of talent I have this year has been phenomenal.
People are always the company’s most valuable asset.
There is so much marketing and broader talent out there, but quite often it is not heard, seen or fully utilised.
I have been so lucky to work with uber-talented people in the past, at more established, marketing-leading companies and our agency partners.
But when outside of the breadth of that scaled ‘limelight’ what does shine through (particularly over the past year's experience), is the magic that is out there in the client’s teams, or with specialists who are either sole traders or operating in smaller or new businesses.
Larger businesses should look at the opportunities that these offer up in terms of pulses of support that can turbo projects, marketing delivery or in-house capability.
Internally within the bigger client organisation, I also think there is a need to take advantage of that value therein – their people.
There is so much insight and ‘untapped’ knowledge and momentum that can be released to help with business and marketing challenges. Often driven by taking a moment to open up the veins of the opportunity that could already be flowing inside their business.
Making strategy come alive from within your own teams.
Quite often it could be as simple as slightly adjusting the ‘how we do it around here’ either adjusting a bit of working style or/and ensuring clarity and simplicity in communication.
Ensuring that the team understand where we are going, can really help – and can be delivered through really effective focusing weekly sessions or in regular planning, the consolidation of strategy and identifying its activation by area of focus by quarter across teams.
This can allow a real focus on critical topics (in the regular team sessions), clarify decision-making and empower the broader teams in their role across a shared mission – it can make such a difference.
This however does require a moment to be taken to get off the merry-go-round and discuss strategic challenges.
Some of the projects, workshops, and sessions I have been part of in the past year have shown this to be of tangible and long-lasting value.
Sadly, creating that moment can sometimes be the biggest blocker to moving this.
Showing gratitude is one of the simplest and yet most powerful things…’
Alongside this one of the other things that stand out for me from the year is the power of regularly acknowledging ‘gratitude’ by regularly saying thank you. There is real power in regularly saying appreciating the efforts of others.
Although for some it is awkward at first, ensuring this occurs regularly, can breed the right behaviour, conversation and will continue to create and build a positive environment to work in.
It has been great to see this in action and the culture that it seeds for the future.
New technology and themes for 2023 (no, not AI just yet)
Within the second half of the year, I had the opportunity to take a step back and consider the bigger themes affecting marketing and there are a few of note.
Business and digital transformation
Cross-functional working – the unifier mindset
Dynamic marketing toolkit and capability
Measurement and analysis of marketing performance – to drive action
Customer centricity – at the heart of what we do
Elevating the customer experience at every brand touchpoint
Integration of marketing activity
It is funny but they are not necessarily new themes to the last 5 years and are not wholly technical, more so behavioural.
The need for businesses to answer the challenges set by the above, and the opportunity and impact they can have when they are driven and actively managed is still massive - but still out of touch with most businesses.
Often acknowledged mostly, but rarely answered.
There is so much technology out there that can help address some of these needs and challenges – that can evolve our ability to derive insights, and power a simply better and intuitive customer experience.
Whether this is in data management, insights and analytics, content management, performance media automation and evaluation or your use of CRM across your interactions – there are so many ways to go about this.
This does not need to be heavy lifting and does not need to be significantly expensive.
As Mark Twain said ‘…the secret of getting ahead is getting started’. Take the first step.
Mark Ritson and the long-term and short-term strategy.
The other benefit of running your own business is the opportunity to make time to learn and refresh your thinking. Back in December, I was able to attend Mark Ritson’s live presentation of his ‘Top 10 marketing moments’ from the year – it is my annual guilty pleasure. Apart from it being a wonderful use of time, the other thing that has stood with me since was
Mark’s description of the need to mix both long and short-term strategies for marketing investment.
It is a challenge that all businesses continue to stare into as they want to drive scale and engagement, both for the start-ups becoming scale-ups, and the established players looking for growth - and I have certainly seen this a few times in the past year or so.
Our challenges this year have included customer engagement and loyalty, building brand exposure, credibility and advocacy behaviours. All circle around this topic and values in more strategic activity which build in
For me, this articulates the challenge of reviewing marketing efforts, from the perspective of cost efficiency and strategic fit and shows the role that some of these ‘brand and engagement’ activities, can have over the longer term.
Listen to more on this here from the authors: Les Binet & Peter Field interview
Listen more from Mark Ritson (2 parts): Mark Ritson with CMO Simon Cheng Mark Ritson with CMO Melissa Hopkins
Please listen and watch – absolutely fascinating.
So a little more background on long and short-term?
Summary:
Mark refers back to the legendary Peter Drucker who wrote ‘that the business’s job is to keep their nose to the grindstone whilst lifting their eyes to the hills’.
What he meant by this, is that a business should operate in two modes at the same time: results for today, whilst preparing for tomorrow (the short and long term). Being conscious that the long term is not simply the adding up of each of the short-term!
Over the course of their analysis, Drucker and the team looked at hundreds of case studies of marketing, looking for examples of growth (or sales uplift) over the base and how this occurred over time.
This analysis was supplemented in 2013 by Les Binet and Peter Field, with their piece that focuses on the growing tension that exists within short-term and long-term brand building.
What they both found was there are two trajectories to growth, shown in the following link: Summary image of impact (Thinkbox)
The two lines show differing strands of activity - the first of which is red. This is the short-term strategy or performance marketing.
Performance marketing has a direct response goal, and the channels generally include social, PPC, email, search, digital display and so on. It’s great because you can spend a little bit of money, and the resulting effect is a hugely measurable direct sales uplift.
In striving for growth, a business will look to exploit this simple equation, but if you stop spending, sales go back to where they were. When scaled, performance marketing can become inefficient and will and should cap scale.
Importantly there’s a second trajectory to growth, this is seen in the blue line. This is the long tail of brand building – yes for sure it is more incremental, which takes time, but it builds to set up future sales and can protect your existing base.
By using both approaches, you can benefit from the compounding effect of increased sales and ROI over time.
If so simple to understand, why is this rarely actioned?
This typically will be down to the fact that most businesses do not work towards a 5-year plan and the difficulty for a business to assess marketing strategy and activity over a longer-term basis.
Often there is a need to look at payback periods within a financial year, often they are usually focused on delivering results for that quarter.
Therefore, we think we see that the better ROI comes from those things that you do today that deliver results right now – and that comes from performance marketing.
This is where we spend most of our budgets and efforts.
The incremental nature of long-term brand or engagement-building campaigns and activity was meant to be their strength, but in the increasingly short-term world of marketing, it became their downfall. It took time for brand campaigns to be developed and then fully deliver on any sales impact, and that was simply not something that most marketers could justify or deliver.
By going short, most marketers did make more money in the upcoming year, but most also started to lose potential profit in years two and onwards. But their focus on effectiveness stops them from understanding or seeing this tragic state of affairs and encourages them to make the same mistake every year that followed.
Too many marketers were needing to take a 12-month, or shorter, horizon and then move their activity in a sub-optimal direction as a result. The great irony of this focus on ROI was that, having adopted a shorter-term approach, almost all of the marketers that did so ultimately destroyed much of the profit potential of their brands.
The need to shake it up.
One of the reasons I fell in love with marketing was its ever-changing landscape and the past few years have demonstrated this is still alive and kicking.
In speaking to potential or current clients it is clear that for all there is a continual need for marketing transition – it’s a rolling cycle. Typically, this is in the use of technology and data, the approach to increasingly changing regulation, or satisfying customer demand and engagement but this could also be how to strategically drive step-change in growth, customer engagement or customer value.
There is so much out going on out there, so many ways to improve performance and make a positive impact. The magic is knowing where to start.
Alongside this, it is really important to understand that the challenges and transition required by each business, will be different. Informed and guided by their maturity, sector and stage. There is no one set rule.
So prioritise, focus, look up and create space for innovation and insight – create space. Encourage you and the team to become aware of new developments, have opinions and consider the impact (for you and your business) of the dynamic environment in which we continue to be lucky enough to work.
Right now? Wow, we have Open AI’s Chat GPT or Bard from Google, the impact of the continuing change, GDPR and the UK development of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill or the seismic shifts in priority of first-party data.
Personal bits – a wrap-up:
Importance of your network, friends and colleagues – always try to leave a positive footprint.
Be honest and authentic – there is real power in holding onto this and forging strong relationships.
Breed a culture of saying thank you – try it out, it works.
Be comfortable in establishing your lines and priorities when it comes to balancing focus, time and energy.
Be ruthless with your time – as Stephen Bartlett recently said. ‘Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning this midnight oil. It’s about priorities, planning and fiercely protecting your time.’
Foster a curious and open mind and create the space to look up – take advantage of the opportunity ahead and desire to learn continuously, across teams.
Clarity on your purpose and positioning - establish a clear and distinctive proposition and hold this close to you always – it is why you chose to do it in the first place. Check yourself against this regularly.
Understand the competitive landscape in your positioning within it – you can learn a lot from looking at others in and out of your sector.
Continue to adapt your style and approach - it is vital when working with multiple clients and people of different stages of marketing maturity and confidence.
Embrace change, make time and welcome working within ambiguity – it is often within both that most opportunity exists.
Play-to-win behaviour – you can make it so! Always ensure that you remain positive in how you behave when times get tough – ensuring to kill off those ‘avoiding-defeat’ behaviours.
