Strategic Marketing for 2022

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All right, Devin. So good morning.

Good morning.

You know, the weather is getting a lot colder around here in New England, and that usually means that winter is coming. And winter is coming. Spring's not far behind. So we will be heading into 2022 soon. You know, personally, 2021, like 2020, has been an interesting and challenging year for many. You know, these, these last couple of years have been very strange with COVID and all that. But I'd like to talk with you a little bit today about what we can expect in 2022 and what people should be focusing on now. Because if you don't start planning now, the new year will be here sooner than we think. And without a plan, you know, any road will take you anywhere you might go and you might not end up where you want to be. So what do you think people should be doing in terms of planning right now? And what trends and sort of you know, industry indicators are we seeing right now that might influence, uh, planning for people going into '22? I know that's a broad topic, but you got 10 minutes. Take it away.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think probably the first and foremost, one of the amazing things about doing kind of strategic planning into future years is that it actually gives the opportunity to look back and see what happened during the, the year, right? And, and obviously for most For most organizations, if you are actively, you know, if you're going to be doing your strategic planning in the months of November and December, certainly you'll be running off of, you know, 10 to 11 months worth of data, or you could certainly do a 12-month look back. But it's a great opportunity to really sit down, spend a couple hours, evaluate, you know, what were all the activities that you actually did, and what did those produce? And was there a positive ROI or not? Those are, those are obviously first great steps as you're thinking about strategic planning moving forward. I think it's also really helpful to just have good questions lined up and work with executive teams to be able to figure out what are the big goals for 2022, right, and beyond. What are you trying to accomplish within, you know, within that next year, whether it's a big hairy audacious goal or it's something that is pretty objective-focused, very goal-oriented, you know, very, very narrow and focused. I think strategic planning is often perceived as, oh, it's got to be this elaborate thing that everybody needs to be involved with, and there's got to be huge goals and objectives and, and, you know, all these budgets set. It doesn't always need to be blown up that big. I think, and especially for organizations that maybe don't currently do any type of, you know, strategic planning from a marketing lens, or certainly even from sales as well, I think it's good to be thinking about You know, what are the, the quick things that you will be able to try out in 2022 and obviously replicate, uh, what was successful? If you put a dollar into a vending machine and you got $3 out, well, what can you do to optimize that to make it $5, right, in, in 2022, as, as the example goes? Okay, so, so I, I think that's a big thing that, uh, folks can start with as they're thinking about Strategic.

Yeah, so a look back is really a great idea and seeing what's worked, what hasn't. You know, are we seeing any trends, uh, among our clients of people adopting new technologies or, uh, new, um, I don't know, methodologies that they're, that they're pursuing that you think might be worth, uh, people investigating if they haven't already?

Yes, absolutely. I think the biggest thing, and, and certainly it's kind of a catchphrase, it's in the industry now, it's a hot buzzword, is ABM, account-based marketing. Especially for those that are B2B, that is a huge— that should be a huge focus moving forward if you haven't already put emphasis on that yet. Because what it effectively does is it just helps narrow the strategy, or, you know, if you're spending money advertising and you're casting this wide net, ABM just helps give the framework to be able to narrow that net or shrink that net down a little bit more. Right, and I think probably the biggest underlying benefit that most people don't think about right off the bat, but again, for B2B organizations, it's alignment around your sales and your marketing teams and, you know, any other operational teams that may need to be involved in what you do, whether you're software or, you know, event agency, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, so I think that's probably going to be one of the biggest plays that I will continue, you know, in 2022 that I think a lot of B2Bs are going to implement or look to implement, um, because it is such a hot topic in the industry right now. And there really stands to benefit— their B2Bs stand to benefit from implementing something like ABM because again, it helps streamline the focus, it brings a little bit more alignment in on its teams, which, you know, in even recent years marketing has seemingly been off on its own little planet while sales is doing its own activities. And there's always headbutting involved, right? No, you're not— sales is complaining about marketing not driving the quality leads. Marketing's not complaining about good qualification information to get the right leads in the door. Those days are gone. Like starting in 2022, they need to be gone. So that's where, you know, ABM will be a very, very hot topic. For next year. And if you aren't strategically thinking about that in your planning for 2022, you need to be.

Okay. Any other technologies or anything like that you see that are really kind of taking hold, not necessarily new, but, but growing in terms of, uh, implementation?

Sure. I, I think the other biggest thing, and it obviously it coincides with ABM platform, or, you know, just ABM in general, is around CRM and marketing automation platforms. Long gone are the days of you know, huge technology stacks that don't integrate with each other, right? Zapier, PieSync, all these integration companies can only do such a good job to make your databases talk. This is 2022. You absolutely need to be on a unified kind of communications plan and have everybody singing from the same song sheet, so to speak. That's the only way that, you know, I, I I could foresee companies being really wildly successful in the future is if they're all looking at the same information, they're all saying the same things, right? They're seeing the same piece of information. Marketing and sales should absolutely be in alignment in terms of, you know, what were the touchpoints that these people were having, right? How, what's the timing around communications to them? How can we hand off, you know, how can we hand off people effectively from marketing to sales to customer service as an example? Like, that needs to be a seamless flow. And I think a lot of that is driven by big companies, you know, the Apples, the Microsofts, the Amazons of the world. They've, they've really spoiled a lot of people and set a really high bar for communications. And 2020— 2022 is the year where that's going to trickle up. Companies will be able to— we have the tools and the means now to be able to have seamless communication and an understanding of, you know, people and personalization, now's the time to be thinking about that.

Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing prices for, you know, the cost of entry for CRM and marketing automation platforms really come down over the last couple of years. So it's, it's, it's really accessible even to small organizations and not necessarily just B2B organizations. To kind of get everything on the same, you know, getting everything talking to each other in a unified platform like a marketing automation platform. And I encourage people to, if you haven't gone and looked at this stuff lately, you probably should. It's pretty amazing what these tools can help you do. And they're quite affordable these days. It's no longer the day that you're going to need a whole IT department to implement and run this sort of thing. So yeah, yeah, gotcha. All right. Anything else to wrap up here, Devin, before we go?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that will make 2022 the most successful for B2Bs is if you were going to try new strategies, please, please, please make sure to measure them adequately. Like bar none, it's such a waste of money and time to just throw, throw spaghetti at the wall and pray that it's going to stick. Right? It's okay if it doesn't stick, but you need to know that, and you need to effectively measure that and be able to prove if there's ROI or not. And I think a lot of marketers up until this point in time have gotten away without doing that to some extent, and really, we're getting into a trend where that's an unexcusable act now, so to speak. Measuring everything is going to be critical, even down to you know, A/B testing ad creative that's out there, you know, A/B testing landing pages, emails, like everything, you know, platforms that are being used. Like, there are no excuses not to be measuring what you're doing now. So for 2022, I think that's my final, my final thing as I'm stepping off this soapbox is, uh, if you're gonna try something new, if you're gonna try something interesting, at least measure it. Just see how effective it is. And, and roll with the punches because we're going to have a lot of other technology changes coming down the pike that we just won't be able to control. I'd be shocked if Apple doesn't produce other privacy-centric, you know, means that are great for consumers but bad for marketers. I think there could even be something like a GDPR coming over into the US potentially within this year or next year or 2022 or 2023.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I think now is— we have a gold mine of information that's available. We have a gold mine of, of all these platforms to be able to use. Go out there and try stuff, break some eggs, and let's see what happens. And measure it effectively. That's my big ask.

Good. All right, well, thanks, Devin. This is a very— a lot of food for thought for, for folks. So thanks.

Absolutely. And good luck to all you planners out there.

All right, take care.

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