Geoff Wolf, EVP Client Strategy
Serious car accidents spiked by 17% the Monday after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, proving that even a one-hour change can be painful and risky. How dangerous is change within our marketing world?
Well, it’s actually life-threatening to our marketing programs. But we can’t stop change itself, so we must learn to adapt.
The biggest change marketers face is evolving customer behavior. People make purchases that drive our businesses while undergoing massive behavioral shifts in shopping habits. As customer behavior changes, so must our marketing programs.
Here are three things that we can do to mitigate the risk associated with changes in marketing realities:
- Match the Speed of Change
When change happens fast, it’s easy to see. For example, when Google updates its algorithm, a website’s organic traffic is affected immediately. We must make adjustments quickly – with extensive changes or small tweaks – to preserve their rankings. These adjustments help maintain the key performance metrics we are striving for. Most e-commerce marketing tactics behave in a similar fashion. To mitigate the risk in this rapidly-changing digital arena, we must keep a close eye on the vast amount of data available.
In the catalog marketing world, change is slower. However, I would argue that these changes are the riskiest because of the high cost of mailing and the longer feedback loop. A slow erosion of AOV and response rates might not set off the alarm bells the way a large drop would signal the need for testing, adjustment and change.
Online or offline, the success of customer acquisition and retention programs hinges on how appropriately you react to change as it is happening. The strategies and tactics in place for these important practices must be constantly revised to keep up with customer behavior.
- Match the Scale of Change
Testing a slightly lighter-weight paper for your catalog is a small tweak in the scale of things. On the other end of the spectrum, Amazon’s rise is a tsunami-sized change and one that can threaten the very existence of your business.
When it comes to adapting to the reality of Amazon, brands are finding they need to evaluate the foundations of their businesses, especially in terms of proprietary merchandise assortment and profit margins.
Customer acquisition is difficult when it comes to stealing market share from Amazon. Finding more value from existing customers is a little less challenging, but still a formidable task. It takes more than a casual adjustment to meet these needs. If the scale of the change is big, your response to it must be too.
- Foster an Agile Culture
Adapting to change is the most important thing we can do to mitigate the risk, and it’s also the most difficult. Company culture can be one of the biggest challenges to overcome.
When I had my own catalog business, I learned that getting the entire staff comfortable with change was necessary to be able to adapt quickly, if at all. This is a formidable challenge as it tugs at the root of human nature. People are so afraid of change that most avoid it in some very powerful ways.
That said, we have to combat that urge and be ready to adapt to change regularly. Sometimes a change is fast, sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes the scale of change is minor, sometimes it is existential. Our role as marketers has changed as well. We now have to be able to recognize change, understand how fast and big that difference is, and then adapt to it accordingly.
Tags: Customer Behavior, embracing change, Geoff Wolf, marketing, marketing programs