NAED to Host Adventure Marketing Roundtable Discussions

NAED is hosting a series of Adventure Roundtable discussions to help you dig into your use of data for your marketing strategies. The first event is less than a week away, on July 22 at 1pm Central time. The series of three events will kick off with Mark McGready, Director of Strategic Analytics at SPARXiQ and NAED’s Data Insights Advisor, helping you use all of the tools at your disposal for three key activities:

• to take an audit of the changing business from before the pandemic to today
• to define and understand the upcoming market changes that will impact their business
• to build a tailored activity-specific plan of your goals and objectives in a post-pandemic world

After the presentation, attendees will break into smaller groups for virtual roundtable discussions on the topics.

There is still time to register yourself and your marketing department for the events. You can register for the events by clicking here.

tED magazine took the time to send McGready some questions to help you understand what will be addressed during the first event.

tED magazine: Explain the difference between organic growth in your business and revenue increase due to price increases, and how that impacts your marketing strategy.

Mark McGready:  Organic growth is increased volume of product being sold, either with new customers or increasing sales to existing customers. Price increase growth comes from increase supplier costs being passed along to your customer. For example, your business might be growing by 10%, but if suppliers increased their pricing at the start of the year by 5% then half of your success comes from that increased price and your true organic growth is half of what it appears to be.

Price increase growth is not a bad thing – if you can pass on the price increase to the customer while maintaining your current margins you make more profit the same way, but understanding this difference is still important in gauging your sales force and your business health. 2021 has see several large price increases due to supply challenges, it’s unusual in that regard, so price increases are a much bigger factor this year than in normal years.

tED magazine: How are you looking at your data, and should you be comparing it to 2019 or 2020?

Mark McGready: The best answer is that you should look at both. 2019 is a true gauge of where your business was before Covid, and so as we move away from the impact of Covid and life gets back to normal you should compare to life pre Covid. That’s the best measure for understanding if your business is recovering and holding market share. Many businesses had different responses to Covid in 2020, some saw large decreases in revenues, and other saw little to none.

Year over year comparisons are still relevant, but everyone should take the gains they’re going to see in 2021 in the context of what happened in 2020.

tED magazine: It’s an interesting environment with the demand for work increasing fairly quickly. How should marketing departments be targeting customers, and what are the messages that are most important for the rest of this summer?

Mark McGready: In times of change companies have the best opportunity to gain or lose market share. Customers will be in a position to shop around and will be questioning existing services as they build their own post recovery business plans. It’s a classic ‘Interesting Times’ situation.

As such, marketing departments should be putting in renewed effort in targeting their messaging based on where things stand with their various customers. From ‘how else can we help you’ with strong existing customer to ‘come back we miss you’ to lost customers. This will be a time when relationships are renewed or new relationships are built. Marketing departments should be very active this summer honing their messaging to be situation specific.

tED magazine: Should your marketing strategy be in a constant state of change? As new data is analyzed and conditions vary, how often should you be re-assessing your marketing messages?

Mark McGready: Yes and no. Roughly 80% of it should be the things you’ve always done – new products, new services, new features and so on. 20% of the effort should be reactive to what’s happening to the business. And I come by those numbers as 80% of your customer base will likely just keep on trucking like it always has, many of your customers are long time relationships, but the 20% allows for attrition and addition and marketing should be responsive to those situations.

Great marketing teams will already have something like this in place, but it does rely on a sophisticated embrace of data analytics and building action plans surrounding those findings. Companies who become great at this will be able to focus their marketing investments on larger returns on investment, and so keep an advantage over competition.