The days of requiring a massive fortune 500 budget or agency to tackle all or many aspects of your digital engagement strategy is well behind us. Organizations large and small have turned to pulling many of the core digital aspects in-house to save budget, maintain control and more importantly own the process. A lot of this can be attributed to an influx of amazing, simple to use and cost-effective cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) tools readily available to service anyone and any budget size.
Putting budget aside, let’s quote Steve Jobs, “Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well”. Select one area to focus on. Let’s take a consumer brand that relies heavily on live experiences so the consumer can touch, wear and possibly play with the said product. How do you focus on one thing, “live experiences” and do it really well?
Traditionally brands would hand over control by outsourcing these live experiences and digital development requirements to their agency. Far too often these experiences would be one sided. The consumer would reap the benefits of having a good time interacting with the said product during a wild event. The brand would obtain some decent impressions and word of mouth. Maybe the consumer would purchase the product on the spot. But the valuable data that you could be collecting from that purchase could be missing after the curtain dropped.
Marketing decision makers are left uninformed on what next steps should be. They are unable to tie their big budget spend to some form of ROI or collect valuable consumer insight to share with internal teams like their research and development department. What if consumer leads could be generated and distributed in real time to the sales team? How can marketers capture consumer feedback, analyze this data and be able to implement changes in this product? What about having measurement benchmarks developed to analyze opportunities or successes? These questions are asked a lot and decision makers struggle with finding a solution.
Most decision makers believe additional budget or a budget increase would be required to solve these challenges and this statement is a common misnomer. A problem doesn’t always mean that a big ticket spend is required to solve it.
It takes a plan:
Start with a clear understanding of the problem.
Identify your end result or utopian vision.
Develop individual steps in-between.
Tackle each step independently that lead you to utopia.
Cheaper, Better, Faster. Three common words used in the world of disruptive SaaS solutions that will help you define, align and solve many if not all of these problems that prevent marketers from reaching their utopia. Marketers now have the ability to decrease budget spend, increase control, own the development process and creative for their digital assets.
More importantly,
