Preventing Stagnation in Your Marketing Campaigns

Are your latest marketing campaigns stagnating? Do they have that “been-there, done that” feel to them?

You may have tasted success, with genius marketing campaigns propelling your brand to new heights. Or perhaps, your previously published marketing content still has the power to draw eyeballs and attract clients.

But that doesn’t mean it’s safe to rest on your laurels. In fact, having a strong marketing campaign in place can be both a blessing and a curse!

The blessings are obvious—you can relaunch an old-but-effective campaign to yield new returns, from client retention to market growth.

After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Well, you may want to reconsider this, because in marketing, one of the greatest dangers you can face is stagnation. 

Why is stagnation such a risk in marketing, and what can you do to avoid it?

Fight Fear

There’s much that can be learned from experience, and when you’ve hit on a winning formula for reaching your target audience, it can be scary to shake things up. 

However, your tried-and-tested content may not reflect the realities of an ever-evolving market. The needs and expectations of your audience are moving targets, and your marketing strategy must move along too—if you want to be successful in the long term.

This requires cultivating a culture of change in your team or organisation, which includes learning to tolerate risk and uncertainty. Fundamentally, it’s about knowing how to handle fear.

Fear can be a vital part of your marketing process, provided that you are ready to face fear with courage. This is not an abstract notion—in organisations, facing fear involves putting change management strategies in place to support the creative process.

Among the most important of these strategies is the development of change leaders, who can help to communicate and implement transformation processes with positivity and support for the rest of the team.

When it comes to preventing or reversing stagnation in marketing, moving towards a change culture and developing strong change leaders are essential to fostering a climate of innovation and agility. Everyone will be more engaged in the transformational process, when they feel more secure in taking risks.

Cultivate Creativity

Typically, creative inspiration doesn’t strike like a bolt out of the blue. For most of us, creativity takes patience and hard work.

The good news is that you can use online brainstorming tools to facilitate innovation, even when you’re working in virtual environments with geographically distributed teams.

With these online ideation tools, you can keep track of ideas and chart the development of each idea.

When marketing concepts and prospective campaigns are graphically organised and easily accessible to the entire team, everyone can make connections, identify and address potential challenges, and build—as well as innovate—with efficiency and efficacy.

Draw Inspiration from External Sources

One of the greatest risk factors for marketing stagnation is insularity. Marketing teams can easily develop their own echo chamber, particularly when team members have worked together for extended periods.

To break out of the team rut, you will need to turn outward and look to external sources to help identify new creative opportunities. Keeping abreast of industry and market changes is a great place to begin, but you should not stop there.

You can also draw inspiration by looking at what your competitors are doing and assessing what is working well for them, and what isn’t. This is precisely the kind of information that your marketing team can leverage, in order to develop innovative brand differentiation campaigns.

Client and market data can also help to foster creativity, by removing some of the risks from the creative process. When your team has hard data to understand the market and the target customer, they will be freer to explore, test, and innovate.

In this way, your data analytics may well prove to be one of your most effective creative tools, both inspiring and affirming the transformations that will rescue your team from the perils of stagnation.

The Takeaway

No matter how successful a marketing campaign or brand strategy may be, if it is to remain relevant and effective, it must evolve.

With courage, a commitment to change and innovation, and the right tools, marketing teams can guard against stagnation. In the process, this creates an environment in which creative risk is rewarded with continual growth and enduring inspiration!

BIO: Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest United States. She enjoys writing about better living through education and technology. She is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.