Marketers, Are You Ready For The New Financial Year?

We just entered a new financial year. For marketers this means new budgets, new opportunities and new targets.

Strategy, strategy, strategy

Learn from the past but don’t let it define you

Last year may have been your most successful yet, but the same again will feel like stagnation.

You may have limped to the finish of the most challenging year in your career-This can be flipped into a positive:

• An audience that didn’t engage can teach you as much or more than an audience that engages
• The only way is up

Implementing a new strategy doesn’t happen overnight, but will very much be dependent on what your new budget looks like and more crucially the team you have to make it happen.

Your Team

Will last years`dream team achieve the same success this year? Make sure you can answer the following questions:

• Are they keeping up with new trends?
• Are they able to deliver what the market demands?
• Is the hunger still there?
• Are they going to stay? Good people will seek a new challenge if they don’t feel challenged, mediocrity will stay.

The Evolving Skillset

We’re seeing an increasing number of positions that require a far more comprehensive understanding of social media.  Nowadays, for example, its not unlikely to see marketing jobs primarily based on creating content curation solely for snapchat.

There are opportunities for you to reach an audience beyond your email database.  Do you have the team to facilitate this?

The Database

You boast the largest database for C-suite level professionals in your sector. You proudly claim this to any prospective team members who come through your door.

But are you using it?

Do you have a strategically savvy data manager?

• Your team need to have more than an abstract appreciation of Excel.  They need a strategic understanding of your business and how data can drive it.
• The truly strategic data manager is a rare find.

The Design

Are you spending valuable time explaining your brand to a freelance designer or agency only for them to palm your project of on an underpaid intern who a week later delivers design work that completely misrepresents your brand?

Increasingly we’re being asked to find in-house designers to live and breathe their brand.  The feedback we’ve had is that after a few months entrenched in a brand a strong designer will deliver wider marketing solutions.

The Technology

Go to any marketing tradeshow and you'll find that automation and insights are big business.

Is your team up to date with the latest technology?

Does figuring out your swanky new automation system take more time out of your teams’ day than it saves?

Maybe it’s time to consider the ghost of marketing’s future - the Marketing Automation specialist.

Love it or fear it, marketing automation isn’t just going to play a part in the future, it’s here now and it’s here to stay.  Embracing automation is the only option, this will only become more apparent in the next year.

Whatever the challenges you face going into the new financial year, remember it’s an opportunity to smash what you achieved last year!