Deteriorating economic climate, inflationary threats, energy crisis, war in Ukraine and new Covid epidemic in China, the observation is there, projects are changing and companies are wondering about the right marketing plan to implement for this year 2023. ..
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are under intense pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing investments, as well as their contribution to the company’s business performance. They must deliver short-term results while continuing to work on long-term brand development with results that are more difficult to evaluate. Injunctions that may seem contradictory. However, these two objectives are complementary and must be developed coherently and simultaneously. Ultimately, the question raised is that of optimizing investments both in terms of objectives and performance.
Back to basics: understanding the customer
Today more than ever it is essential to know your target customers well. Very powerful new tools and very detailed data are available to better understand who the customers of brands are. To optimize your investments, it is essential to start from this type of study to devise the appropriate messages and creations, which are then applied consistently to communication and marketing campaigns.
Choose your investments wisely – know your brand
Then you need to find the right balance between brand building and sales activation depending on the starting point of the brand.
A recognized brand that has built trust with its consumers will be able to reduce top-funnel investments during this time and capitalize on their brand to build sales and retention. For example, he can set up loyalty actions by offering gifts to his best customers. This kind of action will help create emotion which is the most important force for long-term sales development and profit growth.
Conversely, lesser-known brands will have to continue to build awareness to optimize their performance. Will they be able to handle “cheap” channels at the top of the funnel such as digital, native advertising, influence, social networks. Investments in the brand will therefore nurture trust and, in the process, improve returns from operations to performance and thus acquisition costs.
Taking into account the current context: 3 main trends
Building loyalty in an economic downturn
One of the priorities of CMOs will be to allocate a greater portion of their budget to loyalty, a great classic in times of slowdown or crisis. Indeed, they foresee a future difficulty in recruiting new customers, with in particular an increase in acquisition costs, and therefore want to capitalize on existing customers to retain them and develop additional sales.
While retention is often seen as a complex project, requiring the time-consuming and costly implementation of technological tools, it is often possible to move forward much faster by federating several existing initiatives within the company into a coherent and marketed program. Emotional loyalty operations will contribute both to the development of trust and emotion with the brand and to the development of medium-term sales.
Generate traffic in stores in the “Yes Pub” context.
The increase in card costs, 40%, combined with the implementation of “Oui Pub”, i.e. from 1um September 2022, in several geographical areas of France, the impossibility for retailers to distribute unaddressed flyers in the absence of the “Oui Pub” badge, will force retail operators to find new ways to replace this mode of communication and continue to address the traffic to their stores.
Many distribution brands, and not least (Leclerc, Cora, Système U, etc.), have announced the partial or total cessation of the prospectuses. There are many digital solutions (basic CRM, Presence Management, digital advertising, social networks, SMS, email, etc.) to effectively replace them. These solutions must be declined according to the communication objectives (common thread communication, promotional communication), the types of customers and prospects and therefore the catchment areas. Their contribution to traffic generation must be measured to optimize device performance and cost over time.
Integrate the environmental issue into your business in a context of changing consumer behaviour
Sustainable development is gradually penetrating society, consumer concerns. Indeed, it is increasingly a matter of business for companies, even a matter of changing the economic model. Marketing directors will therefore have to gradually integrate this dimension into their products and services as well as their communication. They will need to envision a more circular economy where trust will become more important than engagement. For example, a bank or insurer can retain its B2C customers by offering them vouchers for the purchases of its B2B customers, a chain store can offer discounts, vouchers or experiences in shops or service brands around its outlets.
The observation is clear: it is essential to achieve an optimal arbitration between the various levers of marketing action, simultaneously taking into account the knowledge of one’s customers and one’s brand, the maturity of one’s brand and the current context. And while the measurement of its performance remains immutable for CMOs, they increasingly need to justify their investments.
It is therefore necessary to set up new methodologies and new means to measure the contribution of the various marketing actions to the development of the company’s business.
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