For marketers, there’s always something new on the horizon.
A new channel, a new approach, new expectations from customers.
This is one of the elements that makes marketing so exciting. Unfortunately, not everyone sees it the same way.
For marketers in the construction and building products industries, change can ring alarm bells for stakeholders. They may be sceptical of new ideas, or resistant to seeing the marketing ROI. This is a very common concern and one that we’ve developed some expertise in dealing with.
Here are our top tips on how to approach implementing change in your business:
As the old adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. A common mistake we see is marketers wanting to change too much, too quickly. Rightly or wrongly, this inevitably causes concern for other stakeholders within the business who may have financial or operational concerns.
We’d always recommend approaching change as a state of mind – rather than as a project to undertake.
Make small changes, prove their success to stakeholders with meaningful KPIs, and then get the investment or stakeholder buy-in to make bigger changes off the back of that. This will also give you the chance to manage the change better and refine your offer along the way to launching your next big idea.
Within construction and building products companies, marketing is often siloed and marketers don’t want to get feedback from other business areas on their plans. This can be understandable – who wants their projects being micromanaged by other departments?
If you involve your stakeholders early, you can get them on side from the start by showing how your idea can actually support them in their work, rather than presenting a roadblock. What are their gripes with the current marketing offer? What are the pain points in their day-to-day work? By getting that kind of insight early on and addressing it in your plans, you might find that the road to innovation is a lot smoother than you think.
Marketers live in a bubble. Every single one of us.
It’s easy to forget that seniors or other departments may not fully understand what we do, or why it’s valuable. That’s why you should always prepare a business case for your plans.
If you can present that this is a valuable project worth investing in, in terms that the finance department can understand, you might find that getting investment in your project isn’t as difficult as you’d think.
Your business case doesn’t need to be a huge cumbersome project – you need to clearly articulate what you want to do, why it’s valuable to the business, and some projected costs, and crucially – the return on investment.
Of course, if you project is something totally new – how do you demonstrate all of this? Don’t worry about making assumptions, the finance department has to make decisions using projections all the time; next year’s sales forecast for example. As long as they’re evidenced and sensible, you should be able to justify your proposal.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is to do your research.
Any idea you may have for your business, there’s a good chance someone else out there has done it already. Learn from their successes and mistakes. They might have even written about the changes they made, or how they got their stakeholders to support them.
Being able to show stakeholders examples of what you’re trying to do can be an effective tool to getting them on side. It’s likely that not everyone in the business will have the same amount of imagination for your project as you will. If you can show them an example of it working really well elsewhere then you’ll have them on the same page.
So there you have it – some easy to implement strategies to get your innovative marketing project off the ground.
With the pace of change always increasing, innovative companies continue to win out.No one ever won an award or found a new audience by doing the same old thing.
Get creative, get innovating, and watch your marketing projects soar.
