When you work in marketing at a retailer — whether that’s bricks and mortar, Ecommerce, D2C, or all of the above — it always feels like there’s more you can offer your customer. More personalization, more relevance, more joy, at every touchpoint. But to do so you also need more. More time, technology, money, staff.
Not everyone has the luxury of more. Retail businesses are reluctant to make big investments right now in these uncertain times. There’s no consensus among economists on whether a recession is still coming. And regardless, inflation is high, the labor market is challenging, and loyalty is low. So the answer must be that your current marketing needs to work harder in 2023. We’re looking for breakthrough efficiency.
But how? At Theorem, we’ve tried and tested methodologies that deliver. We break the process of finding breakthrough marketing into three: Diagnosis, strategy, tactics.
Diagnosis
First, diagnosis. Before we decide on a course of action, we take the pulse of the company we’re working with. We do gap analyses, performance benchmarking, and workshops with stakeholders and experts. We map the comms journey from end to end. We analyze the business’s strategy, vision, and goals.
This initial diagnosis helps identify what can be solved now, what can be solved in the future with investments now, and what’s best to leave alone or remove altogether. Change isn’t without risk, so this audit helps mitigate that. For any business looking for breakthrough marketing, it must start with an honest look in the mirror.
Strategy
Next, we design the strategy that solves the challenges or exploits the opportunities we found. The strategy is the plan that turns identified opportunities into breakthrough results. We look at MartTech stack, CRM, solution design and architecture, automation processes, team capabilities, customer journeys, platform selection, procurement, roadmaps, and more.
We look at how it all ties together — ideally, in a decentralized, de-siloed architecture that can drive an automated omnichannel marketing strategy.
What does that technical-sounding sentence mean? Your plan should give your customers a seamless, useful, and joyful experience with your brand, in the most cost- and resource-effective way for your business.
Tactics
The final step is action. Getting results. These tactics are the specifics that help you execute the strategy. It’s now that we orchestrate our client’s new data infrastructure based on the strategy we designed to hit specific business goals.
Things to implement at this point might include: Personalized product recommendations; Automated order confirmation and shipping notifications; Re-engaging disengaged customers with abandoned carts; Automated segmentation and content delivery; and much more.
Finding your breakthrough
Every marketer knows they need to innovate to keep up with the experiences currently on offer today. It’s certainly not an easy task, but fortunately it’s not a task you need to take on by yourself.
One way to shortcut ‘offering more’ is to work with a full-service digital marketing solution such as Theorem. Our experience working with many organizations of all shapes, sizes, and verticals gives our clients a big advantage. It means we create robust and ambitious yet deliverable strategies. And we can execute them if required.
The benefits of our work are that you’ll stand out from competitors, reduce the cost of new customer acquisitions, improve engagement, and maximize the lifetime value of customers.
Read the Find Your Breakthrough workbook to start analyzing your processes and identifying breakthrough opportunities.
