When it comes to the shared understanding of market context – synchrony leads to greater campaign impact.
I’m envious of people who are effortlessly funny. For me, being funny requires great effort and is met with mixed results.
Funny people have the knack of understanding what’s current, what’s trending, and how those variables affect their audience. What’s more, they understand what their audience will find funny before they joke about it (or else they wouldn’t be funny, right?)
Having a good sense of humor isn’t unlike understanding market context – but how do you make sure your whole organization stays on the same page? Here are some steps that leading organizations take to ensure synchrony in how market context affects their marketing plan.
Synchronous Planning – Lead with the idea, not the offer
How often do you hear, “We have a new white paper, let’s do a program!” If you find that the offers are driving the program, you may have a planning problem. Much like the tail should never wag the dog – it’s the idea that should drive the program – not the offers you have available.
Synchronous planning means that the ideation of the content and offers is directly tied to the campaign themes – meaning the content that’s created is in lock-step with the market context.
Market context can help position existing content as well. You may have an offer that’s evergreen, but if you can retitle it, rewrite the abstract, or even position the piece for market context using email or landing page copy – you’ve aligned the idea with the offer.
Synchronous Priorities: Be on the same page with where to focus
In a mid-market or enterprise environment – not every product gets the same level of marketing support. Depending on the market context – some products may have a stronger story than others at a given time. Synchrony in priorities as they relate to the current market climate ensures that expectations are managed, and everyone is on the same page.
Additionally, your company may have a collaborative goal to increase sales of a particular solution line by 15%. Creating a shared vision allows each department to avoid confusion, set team goals oriented toward this priority, and keep morale high.
Ongoing Research: Keep up with the context
Market context is fluid and informed by ongoing research. Nobody understands this more than marketers during the 2020 pandemic and beyond. Market context relies on timeliness to be relevant, and ongoing research maintains and ensures accuracy.
Always be researching the priorities of your market. Have courage to align to those priorities, even when they are different from the features and functions of your latest release.
Synchronous Iterating: Improve and enhance together
If you need to change direction – is your organization an elephant or a gazelle? The tighter the synchrony between the revenue generating functions, the easier it is to improve and iterate.
A sense of humor relies on timeliness – just watch an episode of Saturday Night Live a month or so after it originally aired, and you’ll see what I mean. As such, poignant marketing relies on an understanding of market context. But times, they are a-changin’ and so the market context changes too. In large organizations with multiple markets and products – it’s important to maintain synchrony on market context to maximize the impact of each marketing program.
