What Marketing Levers Should You Pull When You Face A Challenge?

As marketers, we’re facing challenges daily, but the biggest mistake we see businesses and marketing teams make all the time is facing these challenges with a reactive mindset. Low site traffic, lead quality, creative not converting, the list goes on. So how can we remain agile in the face of these challenges, while also sticking to our marketing strategy? We’re going to cover how small tweaks and small levers can lead to significant impacts, and keep your marketing afloat and ahead of the game. Together, we’ll learn how you can turn challenges into opportunities with the right moves, while introducing you to our Agile Strategy Board concept.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing and challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning intentional marketing strategies.

And today, we are talking around when we face these big problems as marketers. And as marketers, we’re facing these challenges all the time. There are all these different economic challenges. We’ve had, obviously, COVID and pandemics in the past as well, but not only those big challenges, but also some of the challenges that we face within the business day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month. There’s things like more expectations for a less budget. So, for example, creating more content, but not having the spend to have that content circulated. Or high ROAS, return on ad spend. Or sales declining, traffic declining. Suddenly, you’ve lost all your search engine rankings and everything like that.

There are so many challenges that we’re facing day-to-day, but some of the biggest issues that we find with the businesses and the clients that we work with is that they have more of a reactive mindset as opposed to a proactive mindset. So, when they do face a big challenge like that, instead of fighting that fire strategically, they’re just trying to chuck anything at it to try to fix it, whether that’s more cash, which obviously is not the right answer in all scenarios, whether it’s trying to enlist and build a new team in an area where your audience isn’t. There’s so many different things that people can do when they’re in that reactive mindset.

So, what I’m trying to get you to do today is to try and focus a bit more on being proactive instead of reactive. Today’s focus is on scenario planning for marketing. And we want to be able to create a strategy to navigate through any kind of scenario that we face, whether it’s economic uncertainty or whether it’s just standard business issues that we face day-to-day. So, scenario planning really is essential for adapting to any unpredictable thing that you can have within the business. And it’s going to help us marketers be more proactive rather than reactive, and ensure that marketing strategies remain effective despite any external or internal challenge that you face with the actual business.

So, let’s just take it right back. Why and what is scenario planning? It involves literally trying to actually sit down and think about creating multiple plausible future scenarios, and actually developing those marketing strategies for each of those different scenarios. So, for example, if we face this issue, what levers can we pull to mitigate and to try and face that particular scenario, instead of just throwing more cash at it or throwing resources at it that we don’t need?

Today, what I want you to do is think about what levers you need to pull to mitigate and test some of those unpredictable scenarios that you and your marketing team or your business are facing on the daily. And it’s also going to make sure that marketing efforts are never caught off guard, regardless of any situation that you’re facing. So, here’s what I suggest we actually do. Today, on this podcast, we’re going to create a marketing strategy game board. And it’s actually going to help us navigate tricky situations before they arise.

So, now, we coined this the Agile Strategy Board. And it’s something that we’ve developed over time, and we use with our clients. I use it internally for running of Done By Nine, our agency. And it’s a strategic tool that we’ve designed to help marketing teams prepare for various business scenarios by literally adjusting different levers for their marketing strategy. But at the same time, we’re trying to do this and try to stay true to our overall marketing strategy.

We’ve put all that work into our marketing strategy. We’ve planned out from this year through to the end of Q4 at the end of the financial year. We don’t want to deviate that from too much. But, as I say, there’s always going to be some challenges that we’re going to face. So, we just need to have those different scenarios ready and planned as part of your marketing strategy.

So, imagine, this is quite hard to explain over a podcast, but I’m going to do my absolute best. Otherwise, we’re going to make some of these available on our website as well, donebynine.com. But imagine, let’s take a table. Let’s even think about it as an Excel spreadsheet of sorts. And we’re going to have that table divided into two main sections, okay? So, on the left-hand side, so that’s the rows, isn’t it, of our Excel spreadsheet. That’s going to be the column where we’re going to have all our different levers, for example. So, all the levers sit on that left-hand side. And this represents all the different aspects of your marketing strategy that you can adjust. Okay, I’m going to go through each of those shortly, so don’t stress.

Then on the top, this is where I want you to think about the different scenarios. So, all the headers of each column is going to be a different scenario that you and your business may face in your marketing team or your business in general. These are the potential situations that you’re going to face. And what we want to try to do is we’re going to fill in all that stuff in the middle with a bit of a matrix. So, we can really start to see, okay, the scenarios that we have with the top, alongside the levers on that left-hand side. We go into the matrix. We can see what we have planned, and what we potentially could do to be able to face those challenges more effectively.

So, let’s start with the scenarios across the top. I want you to work across there first. So, across the top of the scenarios might be things like sudden low site traffic, or traffic not converting, or perhaps low engagement on the site as well. These are scenarios that are like the challenges, or, if you want to think about it as well, the goals that you and your business is facing or is aiming for, or potentially would face or could face in the future as well.

Here’s a few common ideas that we could put in there as well. Let’s say low site traffic, or your site traffic suddenly declined. Let’s say site traffic’s just not converting to sales, like sales have just plummeted for your online sales at the moment. Maybe sales are resulting in low revenue, the amount that people are spending, smaller size or value in people’s shopping carts if you’re in an e-com business. Maybe it’s a real slow velocity to conversion. It’s taking customers a long time to actually convert. You used to see that it was seven days, and suddenly it’s gone up to 30. What is happening?

Maybe it’s low customer engagement. People on your website or people on your socials, they’re not suddenly engaging. No one’s commenting. No one’s liking. Our Instagram followers aren’t increasing at all. What is going on? It’s a lack of return customers, could be another scenario. It’s the one where you used to get people coming back, frequently buying from you two or three times a year, or two or three times a month, or whatever your business or product or service is. They’re just not coming back the way that they used to.

What are some of those scenarios and some of those problems that you and your business are facing on the daily? And what are some of the things that you’re facing right now that potentially you need to start thinking about and strategising, and trying to mitigate in the future as well?

So those are the scenarios. So again, think about that Excel spreadsheet. So we’ve got the columns and the headers of those columns. That’s where you’re putting some of those potential scenarios that you are going to face. Then we want to work on those levers. Now the levers, these are the variables within your control that you can actually modify. Activities you can do to actually try and mitigate some of those scenarios that you’re facing as well. So once you’ve identified those key priorities and the scenarios, you want to address the potential levers that you want to pull.

Okay, so some examples for marketers include, let’s say it’s media spend. So let’s say that ROAS has gone down, or that you’ve lost reach and impressions, or your organic engagement is down. Media spend is a lever that we can pull. As I said right at the start, just throwing cash at things might not be the answer, but sometimes it can be as well. Sometimes it is a top-of-funnel issue. Sometimes it’s a fact that no one is actually seeing your content.

The other option is messaging. Let’s think about the copy across not only your website, but also your ad campaigns, your social media. Is it just not connecting with your audience anymore? Has the copy shifted from when your marketing strategy was first put together? What type of messaging and copy might be more relatable to your target customer and your customer personas as well? Maybe it’s the customer persona, which has changed slightly, and you need to readdress your messaging to those people.

Think about channels as another lever that you could pull. Channels is talking about SEO organic, for example, versus paid media, versus organic social, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you currently are. Maybe you need to re-look at those different channels that you’re on, and put the channels alongside those scenarios that we looked at before. Maybe it’s the content in general. Is it just not hitting the mark? Is it the photos or videos or something that’s not connecting with your audience?

Targeting. Is it a targeting lever that you can pull? Should we be having a look at that customer persona and changing the targeting? Or is it even a product? Is it a product issue that you have? And is that a lever that you can also pull as well? Is there something you can do to your product or your service to help mitigate, and to help try and alleviate some of those scenarios that we were talking about before?

So here’s some of the questions that you’ll want to ask yourself. So, for example, what would happen if we suddenly increased or shifted our media spending? If we increased it on Facebook, or we completely removed it off Facebook and put it all onto Instagram, because that’s where we’re seeing our audiences now. What would happen if we did that? Some other questions you want to ask is, if we change the messaging, would that improve our customer engagement? Might we offer audiences different or more personalised incentives and offers that might help? Maybe a shift in loyalty and rewards, might that make a difference?

Could we consider maybe other channels, working with new influencers or product aggregators? Are there any type of options in that space that we could have a look at in terms of the channel marketing? How about the new content, new social strategies that we need to have a bit of a look at? Would increasing the number of touch points that we have with our customers or our leads, would that improve our lead nurturing? Have a look at your workflows and think, are we sending the right email at the right time? Are we sending the right text message? Are we getting in touch with our prospective clients when they’re expecting to hear from us?

And so then we’ve got these two kind of parts to our agile strategy at the moment. So we’ve got the top, which is having a look at all the different scenarios. Then on that left-hand side, we’ve listed out all those different levers that we could potentially pull. And then what we want to do in the intersecting cells, where a lever meets a scenario, that’s where you need to start thinking about brainstorming, planning your specific action or adjustment.

Okay, so let’s work through this one. So let’s say under the scenario of low site traffic, you might want to adjust the media spend. So you go to the media spend lever. And so in that matrix, you then want to add a description of something like “targeting spend adjustments to boost traffic”, or “readjust spend to go to our most popular platform”. Put that idea about what you need to be able to do within there, so that you can literally have that plan ready to go.

Maybe under the “traffic is not converting” scenario, if you had that, you could then look at the messaging lever. And in that matrix, you could put in some ideas around how you could better engage with your audience to help increase conversion rates. And it’s just there to help remind you that there are levers that you can pull when you’re in those scenarios where it feels like shit has hit the fan.

It’s kind of like playing a game. You want to identify the scenario or the challenge that you’re facing. Then look at the different tactic, or we’re calling it here the lever, that you may want to pull to ensure that you’re staying true to your strategy, but that you also have that list of levers that is in your arsenal, that is in your toolkit right now, that you can pull when you are facing those big challenges. And it means that when you are facing those challenges, and if you’re reporting to somebody or you’re the business owner and the buck stops with you, you’ve got all these potential ideas already laid out.

Everything’s laid out so that when you come to facing one of those challenges, you can make some quick, fast decisions based on your prior agile strategy planning, but also making sure that you’re sticking true to your marketing strategy as well. And it also means, obviously, that we’re being proactive instead of being reactive. Because again, right at the start, as I mentioned, reactive decisions that we’ve seen from clients and businesses that we work with are always the worst type as well.

So here’s a few more examples of how we can use this in practice as well. So let’s say that the site traffic is high, but we’re seeing that visitors just aren’t converting into customers. They’re coming to our site. They’re coming in droves. This is awesome. We’re getting so much traffic. But our sales have just plummeted. So what we could be looking at there is some of those things like the incentives lever. Maybe you decide to create a special offer for all the site traffic that you’re getting at the moment, like a limited-time discount or free shipping. Try and encourage those purchases. Get people into your funnel. Get people into your customer lifecycle as well.

Another example, if, for example, the site’s just not delivering to expectations, meaning, I don’t know, people visit, but they’re not actually finding what they expect to find on your website. This is where you would then go down to those levers and have a look at the content, for example. Under content, you could have “revise your content to better match your audience expectations”. All those different steps that you can take right now to kind of mitigate and plan for those different scenarios.

So in summary, I want you to try to think about how you can create this yourself, and use this as a bit of a game board to systematically review your marketing strategy. Especially do this against potential business challenges, and identify where you can make changes to improve your performance, like, right now. And by visualising this as a bit of a game board, I find that it’s easier to kind of keep track of all those possible moves that you can make, all those possible things you can do differently to strategise effectively. It’s literally all about preparing for various possibilities, and knowing ahead of time how to adjust your strategy and not just be able to cope with those challenges, but also excel in the face of those challenges as well.

So I really encourage you to start thinking about how you can start to scenario plan and strategise, so that you can implement the strategies faster. You can implement it with more confidence, knowing that you’ve pre-planned for any different business challenge that you may face over the coming next 12 months, or however long you’re in business. So honestly, create your Agile Strategy Board, have it as part of your marketing strategy, and make sure you’ve got everything in your toolkit ready to go to be able to face any marketing or business challenge that you may face in future.

Hopefully you’ve been able to get something out of this. And like I say, we will have an example of what this actually looks like on our website as well. So head along to our website, donebynine.com/podcast. You’re going to find all the other different episodes that we’ve recorded over the years, or our other blog content and pieces of content on there as well. And obviously you can get in touch with me or another member of the team at any time.

Marketing strategy, that’s what we do best, is how we work with our clients. We’ve got different ways that we work with clients as well. Whether you want to come in and go through our Marketing Blend process with us, and just help us guide you over the next three months, or whether you actually want us, me and my team, to actually implement and deliver your strategy as well. We work with a variety of different clients across different challenges that they’re facing with their marketing strategy.

So feel free to go along to our website, donebynine.com. Click the Start Here button and give us your details, and we’ll be in touch to see whether we are the right fit, and we’re able to actually help you in your marketing strategy and how that progresses as well.

And again, a big thank you for listening to the Marketing Mindset podcast. Please let me know if you’ve got any feedback, if you’ve got any topics that you want me to discuss. We’re more than happy to hear them. And any feedback, obviously, is really appreciated as we continue to grow this podcast into the future. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Mindset podcast.