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Have you ever considered this question? I ask it all the time.
Successful marketers have always been marketing and selling via an omnichannel stream, and integrated marketing is mostly self-corrective.
Corrective marketing involves using a holistic program that not only determines the problem areas but also offers a solution, a correction.
The advent and need for corrective marketing
Marketing programs are like a long-range space probe; it may take years to reach its destination and achieve its goal. During that long trip, the navigational jets are fired to allow for course corrections. I believe the same “course correction” needs to be integrated into your marketing efforts.
Define customer adjustments: Approach, price point, education, income, awareness, media, lead, location
The topic of corrective marketing came up when I was having a broad-based discussion with Yves Salama, Principal Consultant at Teem’d, a communications platform that focuses on social media.
We discussed the scope of marketing today and the influence and impact integration of media has on the process. We also discussed the need to redefine most social media strategies to incorporate them into an Integrated Brand Communication strategy.
The first step in such a strategy is to determine the channels needed to make the marketing process as omnichannel as possible, defining or anticipating the needs for the response channel or responsive media and suggesting corrective changes.
But be advised, do not make changes across the broad-based program without understanding that some changes will amplify, reduce, or perhaps eliminate the need for down-the-line corrections.
Align customer view across department adjustments: Social media, product development, customer service, marketing, HR, PR, sales, advertising
Yves proposed the following points during our discussion:
1. Define your customer
The ‘your’ becomes a major component; there is a difference between defining a customer and defining your customer.
2. Define how each department identifies and engages customers
We have seen multiple customer-based definitions constructed by the silo that is leading (and many times not leading) the process.
3. Look at all departments
- How are they organised?
- How are they trained?
- How frequently is updated training offered? I call the updates ‘marketing awareness training’ and suggest that every marketer establish one day a month per department as one of these days
- Clearly define the tools/media each department uses: Also, calculate the value of the media first to your customer and secondly to the brand
- How do they calculate engagement/ROI? We have seen that ROI is calculated differently depending on the silo of launch, and this becomes a serious longer-term problem. What seems to be a tactical success can become a strategic failure
- How are they budgeted? A sub-question involves information on whose marketing money is actually being spent. Market spend confusion thrives across multiple silos and departments.
4. Confirm they have a common understanding of your customer
- Identify breaks: Demographics, segmentation, personas, and more. Think of the process of variable data personalization for your marketing program. Can your strategic brand message be massaged to support the value and view of the media tools selected?
Corrective marketing includes full-power boosters, but it also includes small, slight adjustments. You might revise a setting or make higher, fine-course corrections
- Reframe: Rethink, repurpose, and redeploy. The digital revolution has its strengths and weaknesses. A major strength is the ability to remake, revises, reframe, rethink, and redeploy almost immediately—based on the feedback or, better still, the results. Print-based tools are more difficult to modify, but if you look at the print-based delivery mechanism as a second stage to the all-digital introduction, you may see an avenue that works
5) What to do next, or, better said, what to do first?
Coordinate spend across channels adjustments: Customer support, print advertising, social earned, social paid, user generated content, broadcast, search engine, location/geocache
Boosters are needed
What is needed is a series of boosters – one for each silo listed, with a corrective control device that allows the marketer to literally ‘fire the booster’ to make a mid-course correction, to gain brand traction (PR, social, price) or to increase speed (direct marketing, enhanced product development).
This is also to activate cruise control and allow the effort to self-drive the success (a selected combination of the marketing tools offering the best ROI/ROR and, of course, the best value to your customer).
Rationalise the customer journey across departments adjustments: Social media, product development, customer service, marketing, HR, PR, sales, advertising
Summary
Sounds interesting? Sure. Consider the concept of linking corrective marketing to corrective planning and thus being prepared to change at any stage of the process, not only at the end of a marketing effort.
Continuing the booster comparison, most changes to a live marketing program are based on direction and not often on substance. Simply adding inflight corrections via the media booster to allow the ‘flight’ to achieve maximum planned success is one of the many corrections that can be made.
Corrective marketing includes full-power boosters, but it also includes small, slight adjustments. You might revise a setting or make higher, fine-course corrections.
Corrective marketing also involves constant monitoring and developing the intellectual capital to understand and determine when the corrections may be needed.
What corrective marketing is not is tweaking; it is the process of responding to weaknesses in the marketing program and integrated processes. Corrective marketing is a preplanned process that allows, ‘live’ on the fly changes to be made and offer the ‘magic’ of marketing with the science of marketing.
What do you think? Are your boosters ready? Are you ready?
Is your next marketing effort on the launching pad, and are you thinking of developing a corrective marketing option? You know where to go—call me at mission (marketing) central.
