4 steps to becoming a more strategic marketer in 2023

In the first few weeks of 2023 alone, at least 174 tech companies have cut close to 60,000 jobs, according to Fortune magazine. 

What does this mean for marketers? It’s time to be more strategic.

By knowing where you’re headed, you can use agile marketing to focus on the work that’s going to perform best.

1. Know where you’re headed

So many marketers are working reactively. Until you know where you’re headed, you’ll always be spinning your wheels and throwing darts, hoping one will stick.

As a marketing team, it’s critical, especially in this climate, to understand what business goals you’re driving towards or you’ll be caught in an endless cycle of execution without much impact.

In agile marketing, we align on a Guidepoint that ties directly to our larger organizational business goals. The Guidepoint ensures that everyone understands what success looks like to the team, the business and the customers. It’s a shared understanding that keeps us on the right path forward.

2. Focus only on a few high-return initiatives

The biggest mistake that most companies make is too many projects or campaigns happening at once without evaluating the impact on the business results they are driving toward.

We’ve found that by measuring an idea’s impact, you can be more selective about the work that the team is spending time doing.

Here are a few things you can measure:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as clicks, interaction rates, traffic and page completion rates.
• Baseline metrics that measure your current performance.
• KPI goals for improving current metrics.
• Impact on your business if the KPI goals are met, such as a percentage of sales increase.
• Value in dollars that this brings to your business if the KPI goals are met.

When you take a little extra time upfront to understand the data behind a marketing idea, you get away from simply saying “yes” to everyone’s requests, which will lead to employee overload, especially if you’ve had a reduction in staff.

Dig deeper: The dangers of saying ‘no’ in martech

3. Continuously evaluate metrics

Once you begin launching your marketing, you can’t ignore the data. It’s imperative that you’re always monitoring performance at regular intervals and that you understand when to turn an initiative off.

Too many times as marketers we’re only focused on what we’re going to do, but we forget to ask ourselves what we’re not going to do, or what we’re going to stop doing. 

A few good questions the team should ask themselves are:

• How long will we let something run that’s underperforming from our goal?
• What’s our threshold for stopping work?

4. Quickly ditch low-performing campaigns

Evaluating metrics should be a continuous process that the agile marketing team does daily, or as soon as data is available. 

As part of the team’s Daily Huddle, looking at performance is something they can spend 5 minutes doing, and it will go a long way. 

Why waste time and money on low-performing marketing? Stop and pivot — that’s what agile is all about!

Dig deeper: Why doing less is more in agile marketing

Be quick and nimble in the face of uncertainties

As we head into times of uncertainty, we can no longer afford to work on every marketing tactic that our stakeholders request. 

We must take a consultative and data-driven approach to make marketing less of a cost center and more of a value-added partner.