Offensive vs. Defensive Marketing
Just like in sports, marketing requires a proper strategy of when to be aggressive and when to pull the breaks. Many companies, like Macy’s, fall into the hole of always having promotions, which ultimately dilutes one’s brand and trains customers to only look for cheap deals.
While we always have budgets to meet, never let a short sighted view get in the way of creating long term customer lifetime value. Setting up a plan well in advance will allow you and your team to survey the business landscape and identify the most opportune times to take the offensive and drive profitable campaigns.
Let the data drive your decisions
The buzz word floating around every corporate board room lately is ‘data-driven’, but what does it actually mean? Being data driven means to rely on insights and analytics about your customers to drive how you run your business. It’s more than just knowing when your financials peak and valley, but rather being able to fully understand what drives your customers behavior and how to keep up with their evolving needs.
A good first step is mapping out all of your sales from the prior two years, by day, week, month and quarter, accompanied by the key categories that made up those sales. Looking back multiple years will allow you to identify trends and account for seasonality in your business. If this exercise feels a bit overwhelming, start small and keep it simple, and expand as you start to get the hang of it.
Once you have that mapped out, the next step is to dive deeper into the customers and their behaviors behind those sales. Are you able to identify when your highest valued customers like to shop? What about when specific sales drove in the most business? Were certain sales too rich causing an erosion in margin? The more you dig, the more you’ll uncover these nuggets of valuable insight that will aid in developing a smarter go-to-market strategy.
Learn the competitive landscape
While your goal should always be to outperform and differentiate from your competition, it’s important to keep a pulse on what they’re doing to avoid losing market share. There’s a good chance your competitors are following your moves and countering to undercut and steal your customers.
A great first step is identifying all of the main competitors in your area, and then going to their website to study what they offer. Sign up for their email newsletter and also subscribe to their social media accounts to start receiving their promotions.
Now that you have a steady flow of communications coming from your competition, chart it out on a calendar and you’ll start to uncover patterns in their marketing. Do they always have a sale on holiday weekends? Are they offering special coupons via email? Once you have this base knowledge of what your competitors are doing, you can then take the offensive or defensive to react and protect your market share.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and no one is going to hand you success on a silver plater. That’s why it’s imperative to develop a marketing strategy and plan that charts out your every move well in advance.
Having a plan developed in advance will allow your team to understand and buy into the overall mission and become invested in achieving that mission. This will also allow you to better staff based on when you expect higher and lower volumes based on your plans.
Accompany your plan with monthly and quarterly goals, and ensure your game plan ladders up to these goals. If you’re falling behind on your goals, consider adjusting and offering more targeted offers to drive sales. Account for potential contingencies in advance to avoid chaos from taking shape when you and your team do need to counter and adjust.
Hedge against the unknown
If your business is dependent on factors that are out of your control, like weather or macro-economic conditions, the best thing to do is lock in sales early. This is why you see retailers like ski companies push pre-season sales to clear out old inventory and drive sales before the season takes shape, whether good or bad. The same thing goes for why companies promote season passes, to lock in guaranteed revenue to reduce their dependence on constant foot traffic.
Many of the purchases that consumers make are impulsive and based off of immediate needs, like winter gear for cold weather or food delivery to remedy late night cravings. Customers have many options to cure their impulses, so get ahead of them with marketing intervention beforehand.
If you followed our advice above and are keeping a pulse on your competition, you’ll probably notice that they’re already doing this and it’s your responsibility to counter. This doesn’t mean that you have to offer deeper discounts, but you should be present with some sort of promotion to counteract their market share grab. Don’t get left out in the dust.
When to play defense
Most of what we discussed above refers to offensive maneuvering, but it’s important to note that you don’t have to and shouldn’t always be on the offensive. There are times that you must recognize when the business simply will not be there on particular days and adjust.
Take the Super Bowl for instance; if you don’t offer food or own a bar, chances are you won’t be doing much business on that Sunday. So play defense on that day and instead shift your attention to the shouldering days, like the Friday before, to drive traffic on a day when they’re not consumed.
Holidays are another great example; for some industries, like retail, holidays offer a great opportunity to offer promotions to drive sales. But for other businesses, holidays represent a slow period, which could be a good time to close to give your staff a break or schedule much needed maintenance. It’s important to give your staff some relief to avoid burning out.
In Conclusion
Having a proper game plan will allow you and your team to think bigger and see the business landscape in a whole new way. By understanding what drives your business and also what your competitors are doing, you’ll be able to create an intuitive marketing plan to give your team the guidance to drive the business effectively.