How You Can Future Proof Your Marketing

The following is an excerpt from the book Future Proof Your Marketing: How to Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing Now and During the Artificial Intelligence Revolution by Kevin Getch.

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Are You Ready?

Marketing is about to undergo a huge shift. The changes have already begun.

It wasn’t that long ago that we needed to type a specific query into a search engine and scroll through pages of results to find the answer we were looking for. Now we’re not at all surprised when our phone offers us a list of nearby restaurants. Soon, our digital assistants will suggest dinner at a spot that serves our favorite foods, make the reservation for us, remind us when the dinner hour approaches, and order up a self-driving car to take us there. After the meal, the assistant may pipe up and ask, “Hey, what did you think of that?”

The first time that happens, we will be amazed by what our digital assistants can do for us. I experienced this myself recently, when faced with the daunting task of finding a picture of my elliptical machine in my files. Instead of flailing about on my computer, I used voice search. I just said the word “elliptical” out loud and my digital assistant returned the correct image. It didn’t matter that the file was not named “elliptical” or that the photograph showed only part of the machine buried among other stuff in my garage. My assistant “knew” what I wanted. Amazing.

Very quickly, everyone will come to expect this type of experience, your customers included. I’m sure you already acknowledge the importance of customer experience, but you may not recognize how crucial it’s about to become. I believe customer experience will become one of the largest business-ranking factors in the next five to ten years. Customer experience is already critical to the success of a business, but in the very near future, customer experience will make or break your business. If you don’t comprehend that now, the new technology will not work in your favor. If you do, you open up a world of opportunity.

So, are you ready?

If your company is like most companies today, probably not.

You’ve probably made a good start, like one marketing executive we worked with recently. His company recognized the importance of customer experience in the face of rapidly changing technology. They hired people to handle it, and those talented folks created great content and made a plan to publish it. That was fantastic — probably 90 percent of the people we talk to aren’t even creating quality content — but they had little strategy beyond that. The executive was highly knowledgeable about marketing and automation but didn’t have the internal expertise to make sure that content was optimized for maximum exposure in search engines and for tracking the success of campaigns.

They had a talented team and excellent content, but it wasn’t achieving the desired results. They thought that just increasing traffic was the answer. I told them that getting tons of traffic wasn’t that hard, but it might not be very good quality traffic. What the company needed wasn’t just more traffic but true customer engagement. Not people searching for irrelevant keywords and arbitrarily landing on their website, but the right people, who were likely to take the action the company needed to convert them to customers.

As part of the new strategy we helped them develop, they put in place a better plan to track effectiveness, improved the customer experience, optimized their content to be found in search engines, optimized their paid ad campaigns, and reclaimed over 3,000 high-value links that weren’t properly redirected to their website. Without creating any additional content, their website visits grew by 37 percent, and conversions rose 33 percent over the same month in the prior year. Even better, their company started experiencing enormous growth.

This was a very successful, driven international company, moving forward all the time and swimming fast. They were working hard and doing many things right, but some of their technique was off. Heck, it hadn’t occurred to them that maybe they could stop swimming so hard and build a boat. This strategy would make sure they kept on moving efficiently and get where they wanted to go.

The truth is, many companies aren’t even swimming. At best, they are treading water. They are not only unaware of how digital marketing is about to change, but they also probably don’t have a good handle on their current marketing strategy. If they don’t catch up as technology and consumer behavior evolves, they’re going to be left behind.

Whether you’re off to a strong start and wonder how you can improve your performance, or you feel like you’re flailing around in uncharted waters, keep reading. No matter your starting point, you’ll learn how to optimize your current marketing and prepare for the sea of change to come.

Says Who?

Why should you listen to me? Is it because I’m Webfor’s founder and Director of Digital Strategy and have helped hundreds of businesses grow and succeed? Or because I have over sixteen years of experience in marketing and speak to audiences around the country on how to grow their businesses through digital marketing? Those things tell you something about me, but it’s my passion for helping people reach their goals that I really want to share with you.

That passion was so strong that I decided to trade in my job with a six-figure income and excellent benefits at a Fortune 100 company for no income and no benefits. It was 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession, not exactly the best time economically to start a business, especially with a family and a mortgage, but I simply had to. Every day I went in to work, it ate away at me. Too many times, I’d seen the marketing agency I worked for make big promises and fail to deliver on them. I decided I would rather make half as much doing something I loved and have a positive impact than to continue working there. So I made the leap into uncharted waters.

During that first year on my own, my income was actually less than half as much. I was working eighty hours a week and making a lot of sacrifices, and so was my family. But it started to get better. After a few years, I started hiring people who were better than me at everything — content strategists, SEO specialists, conversion rate optimization specialists, social media experts, paid media specialists, and website designers. Today, we have fifteen people on our team. Having that diversity was important to me.

You probably know the old saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We didn’t want that. By having so many specialists, we were making sure that our clients received solutions that actually worked for them; we offered the right mix of capabilities so we could maximize their internal expertise, allowing them to be as effective as possible. This is why I started my own business in the first place.

At Webfor, we don’t say, “You need this, this, and this — because that’s our package.” Maybe they don’t need all of that. Marketing needs to be tailored and customized to the client’s specific needs. We don’t offer cookie-cutter solutions.

My favorite early clients were people you wouldn’t expect to show up at a marketing agency’s door — Kathy and Sharon, a couple of teachers. These women had started an amazing preschool, but their enrollment was slipping, even though they were putting all of their time and energy into it.

The school was excellent, and they knew it. So what was going on?

The trouble was, they had a fantastic product, but the people who needed it didn’t know about it. The school had done some print media, but the world was quickly shifting to digital. They hadn’t yet adapted.

I loved that little school. My son went there, so I offered to trade services with Kathy and Sharon. We started doing SEO, and within a little over a year, they had a waiting list. They hired more people, reduced their own hours, and got to spend more time with their grandchildren, which was really important to them. That’s the sort of outcome I live for.

Helping Kathy and Sharon made me fall even more deeply in love with my work. It made me realize we weren’t just helping a business — we were helping people. We not only helped two women with a vision but all the people they hired and their families, and the community around the school. To this day, when we bring on a client, I talk to my employees about this ripple effect and the responsibility we’re taking on. If we do a bad job, lots of people suffer. If we do a great job, who knows how many lives will be made better? That perspective makes a job like writing content or reviewing analytics feel a lot more worthwhile.

Ask A Better Question

My goal with this book is to have a positive impact on you and to help you grow your business. If you can come away with one idea that changes your business for the better, then I will have achieved my goal. I know the power of one good idea.

I also know the power of a good question. If you want better answers, you have to ask better questions:

• Who is your customer?
• What path is your customer on?
• How can you provide more value for your customers?
• How can you do it at little to no expense?
• How can you do it when the marketing landscape seems to shift underfoot on a daily basis?

This book is focused on helping you gain a deep understanding of your customers and growing your business. I’ll show you how to develop an integrated omni-channel marketing strategy that will help you do just that. This coordinated approach is what’s needed to prepare your business for massive growth into the future, which is already upon us.

Think of your business as a rowing crew team. Each team member might be a strong, accomplished athlete, but if each rower’s movements aren’t coordinated with the entire team, the boat just spins in place. In the same way, you need more than knowledge of tactics to grow your business — you need to know how they all work together.

To that end, I’ll teach you how to know your target market so well that you’ll think like them and anticipate their needs. When you can predict customer needs, you can deliver amazing customer experiences.

In our accelerating digital marketplace, customer experience is already critical. As technology continues to advance and our ability to gather feedback on customers becomes ever more automated, customer experience will grow even more significant. In these pages, we’ll explore new perspectives, tools, and resources for asking the right questions at the right time to maximize that experience.

Get A Better Answer

This book is for people who want better answers. It’s for business owners, executives, and marketing managers of both startups and established businesses who want to develop a successful marketing strategy, track the effectiveness of what they’re doing, and better understand the future of digital. In the coming chapters, you’ll learn what customer-centric marketing looks like now and how it’s likely to change as customers acclimate to new technology. I’ll share the steps you can take now to prepare yourself to maximize that future potential.

The book is not for people who want to put their heads in the sand and just do things the way they’ve always done them (and keep getting the same results). It’s for people who see opportunity in understanding what’s coming, being able to anticipate it, and taking action now. It’s for people who realize that swinging at the ball after it has been thrown means you’ve already missed. The ball is moving too fast. It’s the same with the evolution of digital marketing: the changes are coming fast and furious, so you have to start your swing before the ball even leaves the pitcher’s hand. Otherwise, you’ll be swinging at air.

In part 1, we will explore the current state of marketing and digital marketing and develop a customer-centric approach that will help you succeed across channels. In part 2, we will consider key trends in artificial intelligence (AI) development that will help you prepare for the coming shift. We will also consider key trends in marketing being accelerated by AI. We’ll explore the macro trends that I call the Three Ps that will be dramatically more Personalized, Predictive, and Proactive than in the past. We’ll close with a consideration of how to create a customer-centric strategy with new AI, and provide some tools to get you started.

As I asked at the beginning: Are you ready? I hope you are, because change is coming whether you’re ready or not. My goal is to make sure you are ready and equipped with the tools and strategy to Future Proof Your Marketing and to survive and thrive in the new digital arena.

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Future Proof Your Marketing: How to Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing Now and During the Artificial Intelligence Revolution by Kevin Getch.