Happy holidays from all of us at Movéo! We hope you’re enjoying a relaxing holiday with good food, family and friends.
This holiday week is a good time to sit back, relax, and reflect on the past twelve months. As Bob Murphy said in his guest post on Monday, 2014 has been a year full of lessons in digital marketing, and at Movéo, we’ve worked to evolve along with the marketing landscape. But without a doubt, 2015 will offer new challenges. How can we leverage what we’ve learned in 2014 and turn those lessons into marketing plans for 2015?
We know that marketing content is changing–we’ve been discussing it on this blog for the past month. 2014 saw B2B leaders come up with effective marketing (like we profiled in last Friday’s post) but 2015 will be the year that all B2B marketers will need to make a conscious effort to combat amateur marketing and make their professional marketing efforts stand out from the crowd. To do this, it’s imperative to combine the emotion and authenticity of amateur marketing and the polish and finesse of professional content. Figuring out how to do this in a way that’s best for your brand is going to need to be a key focus in 2015.
In September, we introduced you to the new marketing value chain: use it to master your operations. Remember its three links: data-driven strategy, truly quantifiable strategy, and the application of creative and technology. The first link discerns hidden patterns in your data that improve the decision making process in the other two links. The second link–strategy–uses that data to minimize waste and streamline operations, and the third keeps your creative work accountable to the data. Think about how these links work together, and develop your 2015 strategy around this insight. By relying on data and insights to guide your strategy, and then keeping yourself accountable to that data, you set your team up for modern, effective marketing.
As Sheri Granholm, our Vice President of Consulting & Engagement reminded us in her blog post earlier this year, “senior leadership requires that you not only quantify your return on marketing investment but also demonstrate and, more importantly, link your efforts to next-generation, sustainable growth.” In 2015, take initiative and prove your positive impact on the growth of your company. Data is the obvious way to do this, because it provides evidence that backs up your work, but you should also make this upcoming year one where you make a concentrated effort to align your marketing with your company’s overall goals, increase communication between your department and others, and fully integrate marketing into the operations of the company as a whole. This month, take stock of how you can do that, and go into 2015 strong.
It’s only a few days until the New Year. How are you going to use the last bit of the year to prepare your marketing department for 2015?
Photo Credit: PgmJanssen via Pixabay
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