The end of the year is fast approaching. And if you're in business you are likely evaluating your financial performance for 2024.
Regardless of your position on the socioeconomic spectrum, you're probably a business leader aiming to prepare for the future by conserving both time and money.
This likely means you've already utilized AI to gain a competitive advantage, or the marketing tools you've been relying on have incorporated AI to steer you towards greater efficiency. At this juncture, the critical question to pose to yourself is, what are your missing? In today's world, you might even consult an AI personal assistant to gain insights into what is considered conventional wisdom.
While LLMs (language learning models) from your favorite AI personal assistant can inspire new ideas, they aren't a complete solution for your business needs. Effective leadership involves guiding your team, evaluating situations, making decisions based on solid evidence, and providing valuable human insights.
No matter what AI technology can do for you at this point in its development, it requires a clear direction informed by a strategic marketing plan that only business leaders can provide. Even so, it's imperative to know as much about AI innovations as you can so that you can make the marketing of your business the engine behind toward the ultimate goal: more sales, more money, faster growth.
Here are three ways you can approach building a better marketing plan in the AI-era.
This is straight-forward year-end review. It involves properly coding every expense in 2024 that contributed to attracting or retaining customers.
The next step in the process is determining the lifetime value of the customer versus the customer sales volume during the year. Even before the year is over, you may be able to project these numbers. This is particularly true if your business is based on subscription sales.
The final step in this annual marketing return on investment review is to compare the numbers. In other words, do the math. Did you spend more on marketing than you earned in sales of either your products or services?
Regardless of the answer, the dollars for dollars approach is designed for business leaders and marketing executives to analyze their gross revenue for the current year and compare it to their marketing budget. It calls for them to consider what can be done differently in the coming year, based on opportunities for AI tools to save money and time as part of overarching business goals.
In a tools-based approach to your marketing plan review, the focus is more on process than return on marketing spend. This approach takes the long-view of marketing planning. So that marketing dollars may be spent at a higher rate than the 5 to 6 percent average per year in the longer term goal of realizing marketing savings in future years. The up-side for sales in the future years are that the marketing automation and AI innovations will produce more customers or clients without incurring marketing set up or ongoing support management costs.
Marketing is always undergoing change. With AI accelerating its ability to learn the repetitious and other less analytical aspects of marketing strategy, you also have options for turning over marketing to an expert in all-in-one marketing automation and content generation.
The return on marketing spend is still a factor in assessing whether time and cost savings are being met year over year. However, the expertise-based approach considers that a foregone conclusion. Rather, the business leaders make a strategic decision to focus on other important savings in other business areas, while trusting they have marketing expertise that provides both strategy and ROI marketing deliverables that works on autopilot. The expectations of marketing strategist and tools chosen are proscribed.
No matter the business growth status, marketing is a never-ending fact of business reality. Marketing demands that change fuel its contours. That's because the marketing process is anchored in influencing the individuals that interact with the process and content to achieve marketing's goals.
To receive a free audit of your marketing stack and options for new strategies, schedule a discovery call with us.