How to Turn Your Marketing Effort From Reactive Into Proactive
It’s far too easy to inadvertently turn into a reactive marketer, where you respond to data only when the need or opportunity arises.
For instance, a professional sports club might spot that for the month of October, a high percentage of 21 to 30 year olds bought tickets and decide to launch a dedicated email campaign for that market during November.
It works! But, by December, ticket sales start to plateau, and the campaign is subsequently cancelled.
Was this successful? To a degree, yes – it brought in more sales. But it didn’t contribute to sustained growth.
That’s what proactive marketing is all about, and here’s three ways you could build it into your strategy:
1. Work with real-time data
Rather than looking behind and falling into the reactive mindset, working with real-time data will help you identify current trends, gain overall visibility of every corner of the business and deeply explore its market.
With real-time data you can also set up alerts in order to identify forthcoming spikes and dips before it’s too late. This not only improves the effectiveness of your marketing, but enhances productivity at the same time.
Happily, most modern CRM systems will provide data in this ‘live’ format, and make its extraction relatively straightforward.
2. Conduct better email marketing
Email is ideally suited to proactive marketing.
Rather than simply conducting campaigns on a whim or in reaction to a report you viewed last week, use segmentation, dynamic content and A/B testing to supercharge your email marketing campaigns.
With these methods, you can better target your audiences with content and products that are more relevant to them and at times they’re most likely to interact with the email.
3. Spot customer churn before it becomes a problem
A common reactive marketing mistake is to act on customer churn once it has started to make itself apparent.
Bringing new customers on board is time consuming, difficult and expensive, therefore the longer you can hold onto existing clients, the better.
With proactive marketing, you can use segmentation to divide your user base into sections that indicate active and inactive users. Savvy marketers will then usually rely on the 4×4 rule where users who have visited the website at least four times in the last four months but who have had no activity in the last four weeks are targeted with win-back campaigns.
The benefits of proactive marketing
The three examples of proactive marketing above can be applied to all walks of business life, and the following overriding benefits may give you impetus to include them within your strategy:
- Campaign failure is minimised
- Competitiveness can be raised
- Marketing budgets can be stretched much further
- Stronger brand awareness and loyalty can be built
Most importantly, gaps in the way you collect data can be more easily identified with proactive marketing, and addressed in order for your business to remain adaptable within this rapidly changing commercial landscape.
Written by Mark Ellis
Mark Ellis is a freelance writer who specialises in copywriting, blogging and content marketing for businesses of all sizes. Mark’s considerable experience at director level and deep interest in personal and business success means he’s ready to comment on anything from freelance writing to workplace dynamics, technology and personal improvement.
