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This week we’re talking about the best – and hardest – part of digital marketing. We’re talking about having the gumption and evidence to pivot your strategy, sometimes even mid-campaign.
Pivoting is a painful concept. We hate the idea of cutting short our meticulously-planned campaigns.
But if we want to stay relevant, it is absolutely necessary.
The best part about digital marketing is our ability to measure results…but once we see them, we also need to act on them.
EXAMPLE 1: LINKEDIN VIDEO
Less than five years ago, companies who wanted to share a video on social media had an easy process.
They would upload the video to YouTube, then share the link everywhere: and the video would appear right inside of Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus (remember Google Plus?).
Then native video arrived.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter started introducing their own video players to keep their users from clicking away to visit Youtube.
One of the last sites to introduce its own native video was LinkedIn. For a long time, users could upload video to their own personal profiles…but business pages couldn’t.
IndustrialSage even released an entire episode on the subject…and then, less than a month later, LinkedIn introduced native players for company profiles.
So we had to laugh it off and toss our old plans out the window.
Are changes like these convenient for marketers? No. But they’re convenient for many of the platform users.
EXAMPLE 2: iPHONE AND WEBCAM VIDEO
Another old vlog of ours was about the quality of B2B or corporate marketing videos.
“You shouldn’t shoot with a webcam,” we always said. “And you especially shouldn’t shoot vertical video on your phone!”
At the time, it was accurate and useful advice.
But by this year, we ended up eating our words…again.
This year, webcam testimonials have been some of the most popular content on LinkedIn – even more than some professionally-produced videos! We’ve even seen the same thing happen with IndustrialSage content, too.
Now user-generated video is exceedingly popular, because it can help you build a personal brand and appear more relatable to audiences.
And don’t forget our story about a certain turkey company!
EXAMPLE 3: VERTICAL VIDEO
As well as pushing for horizontal video, our old vlogs also emphasized the importance of keeping content short.
Audience attention spans in the past decade had clearly been shrinking…then along came Instagram TV.
Not only was vertical video becoming a standard, but the traditionally-short platform was producing longer-form content.
This summer we ourselves ended up adapting an entire video production just to make sure we could shoot the videos vertically for Instagram.
How times have changed…
STAY ON YOUR TOES.
IndustrialSage isn’t immune from major changes to our process, either. As you can tell, even our own website got a little makeover! Why? We felt the need to pivot.
When the show first got started, we tested all sorts of hosting platforms– from YouTube to Wistia to Vidyard – to determine which would provide our viewers with the best experience.
Wistia won out, as you can see…but we’ve also got a lot of Vidyard videos on Optimum’s site, too. Why? different goals.
In this day and age, you have to adapt constantly if you want to stay relevant.
We even had to make a recent change to our latest content offer – in the middle of the campaign!
We were trying to push out a manufacturing survey for 2019, but there didn’t seem to be as much immediate interest as we had hoped. So we switched up the majority of the content we were sharing, and now we’re offering 10$ Amazon gift cards to anyone in industrial marketing or sales who completes the survey.
Was it an easy pivot? Heavens, no. But we definitely boosted our response rate!
The unavoidable truth is that our technology and culture are constantly evolving…so the success of a marketing strategy may depend entirely on the year, the month, or even the week it’s released.
Chris Handy, last week, even admitted that Drift prefers to build their product development based on customer feedback, rather than trying to push their own strategies.
You need to stay on your toes and be brave enough to make changes to your tactics if you see evidence of a shift in the market.
Your goals right now may be different from what they will be six months from now. So be ready to pivot your strategy in sales and marketing.
It will be hard…but it will also be worth it.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!
If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!
Sponsored by Optimum Productions
Author: Rica
Since the inception of IndustrialSage back in 2017, Rica has been one of the driving forces building IndustrialSage. As Marketing Manager, she's dedicated to producing amazing content on the site. There's little she loves more than storytelling: helping to explain new ideas in order to aid others in solving their problems. Fortunately, that's what IndustrialSage is all about.
