Hope you enjoyed a wonderful Christmas!
At the end of the year and especially in the lull between Christmas and New Year…
…it’s a good time to take a little time to reflect on what major trends might impact on marketers and marketing in the coming year.
Hopefully, you’ve already mapped out your Marketing Calendar for 2014. If not…now would be a good time!
As to the shape of the landscape in the coming year…
…I’ll kick off with these thoughts from Dan Kennedy from the December 2013 issue of the “No B.S. Marketing Letter”.
“It pretty much looks to me like more of what we’ve been coping with: many customers with lowered spending ability, many more with less willingness to spend, overall a “tightness” in spending – so we must be smarter, more effective, and more efficient in identifying, reaching and motivating viable customers. Also, to my point made above, we need to craft and present more irrestible offers incorporating more urgency to act vs. delay. We can’t take ANY patronage for granted.”
Dan’s pretty gloomy about overall economic conditions. Of course, he’s talking mainly about the USA and conditions in your local market may be more encouraging. However, his following 4 suggestions will almost certainly pay dividends for any business…
1. Do everything you can and can afford to do to solidify your base of patronage and support, so those customers who actually pay most of your bills – typically 5% to no more than 20% of the total – are so loved, cared for, well served, and fenced in, they cannot leave.
2. Get more customers who are least affected by adverse economy and sell things to them that they judge extremely important thus not subject to disrupting or delaying purchasing of. GROWTH and/or EXPANSION must be more carefully invested in and executed. Many businesses will instead need to shrink size to preserve or increase owners’ profits.
3. Ruthlessly pare unproductive and unprofitable people and costs, even customers, to protect profitability and to be able to remove money from inside your business to build a diversified financial fortress.
4. Be agile.Find ways to be beyond the regulatory burdens…CREATIVE re-structuring and re-invention of business is going to be critical.
Dan celebrated 40 years in the business last year, so he’s been through good times and bad. Ignore his thoughts at your peril.
Now there has been an awful lot of comment about “Content Marketing” in 2013 and one of the acknowledged experts in the field is Brian Clark at Copyblogger. Here are his thoughts on “2014: The Year Of The Rainmaker”.
The counter view, especially from long-time direct response marketers like Drayton Bird is that all this talk about “Content Marketing” is a little overblown and is simply a new term for what good marketers have always done. The case summed up well by Drayton’s business partner and marketing maven in his own right, Malcolm Auld in this post…
…“Digital Marketing Predictions 2014 – The Rolling Stones Were Right”.
Key point…
“If only the digi-spruikers studied history, they’d realise there is almost nothing new in marketing, apart from technology. People still buy emotionally and justify rationally, regardless of the technology they use to research and buy things.
Nothing happens in business until you sell something.”
Well worth reading the whole thing…
…to help you avoid costly blunders.
I’ll update this post as I come across other predictions and comment of note.