Every day I continue to read about the concern by marketers over fragmentation and the complexity in trying to manage the marketing mix.
I'm not claiming to have "the" solution but I am very comfortable in supporting an approach that I've been writing about and recommending to clients for years.
The approach is more of a framework that goes back to basic marketing fundamentals. Many times peers/clients want to dive directly into strategies and tactics, we know this is not the right approach but based on time pressures to perform it has become the default behavior for a lot of activity today. Invariably I almost always have to ask for a time-out, bring the conversation back to the basics and clearly understand the business challenges by asking the following question - Are you trying to:
- drive awareness
- increase consideration, and drive intent
- generate sales
- support and encourage loyalty
- generate incremental sales
With that basic understanding agreed upon, the conversation transitions much smoother into identifying strategies and tactics that fulfill the business and marketing objective.
After that discussion, a whole series of activities must occur internally with the corporation and the agency to manage the marketing mix (e.g,. content calendars, governance protocol, KPI's, dashboard configurations, etc.)
Once you're ready to get started you need to be prepared to move quickly, apply what the near real-time insight and move again.
