What Is Adaptive Marketing?
Adaptive marketing is a key advantage for your business. Here’s Why.
Companies live in a competitive environment that changes fast. New technologies, new trends, new competitors, and new social issues affect our businesses and the marketing landscape. With each shift, you have a choice to make: hold fast or find a way to adapt?
Each change brings an opportunity to grow your brand. If you can stay agile and open to new ideas, you’re perfectly poised to make the most of an ever-evolving landscape. This is especially true when it comes to marketing: if you listen to the analytics, setting aside your own preferences, you’ll achieve better results and optimal campaigns.
So how can you capitalize on your campaign analytics and overall marketing trends? In this blog, we’ll dive into how you can stay ahead of the curve with adaptive marketing.
What Is Adaptive Marketing?
In a nutshell, adaptive marketing is optimizing your strategy as you go. Instead of setting and forgetting a marketing campaign, an adaptive marketer takes the opportunity to learn from campaigns as they’re running.
With adaptive marketing, your campaigns should improve month by month. The result of each campaign – good or bad – should influence how you approach the next one. Each marketing campaign doubles as a fact-finding mission, telling you more about your target audience, the channel you’re using, and your ideal messaging.
The adaptive marketing approach may mix different platforms – both online and off – to create an evolving campaign ecosystem that brings insights. After launching a new strategy or marketing tactic, an adaptive marketer will tune in to the analytics, searching for ways to improve future campaigns.
What Do Adaptive Marketers Evaluate?
You can’t be an adaptive marketer without analytics. By keeping an eye on the metrics from Google and Facebook ads, website traffic, or social media engagement, marketers see what’s working and what isn’t.
There’s every opportunity to try new approaches, expand to new channels, and A/B test your creative. But you won’t know how it’s working until you begin monitoring the results. Pay attention to what the analytics tell you and use the additional information to continue optimizing your marketing strategy.
To evaluate your marketing campaign, ask the following questions:
- Are we meeting our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?
- Are campaigns working as intended?
- Which campaigns are the most successful? Why?
- Which campaigns aren’t working as we hoped? Why?
- What did we learn from the most successful campaigns?
- How can we improve less successful campaigns?
With your evaluations complete, it’s time to take action. Take the opportunity to boost or extend your successful campaigns. For less effective campaigns, decide whether to pause or hit shuffle. You can use your newfound knowledge to improve the creative, or just refocus your budget on what’s already working.
The key to adaptive marketing is acting based on the metrics you gather – whether it’s optimizing a campaign or pivoting to an entirely new direction.
Adapting Your Marketing: Short Term Game vs. The Long Term Gain
You should always be looking to improve your marketing strategies – adapting to the short-term game for long-term gain.
In the short term:
- Focus on key performance indicators and determine whether you’re meeting the goals you set.
- Play around with new ad copy, conduct A/B testing, and compare results of similar campaigns on different social media networks.
- Pay attention to your campaigns. Never let a strategy play out without checking in on it. If an issue arises, you’ll want to know about it sooner rather than later.
- Each campaign should be adjusted based on the target audience and the platform. If you’re repurposing a Facebook ad for Pinterest, make sure you optimize the graphic and rework the copy.
In the long term:
- Be on the lookout for new platforms that may serve your business.
- Stay up to date on the latest features of established platforms. Be inventive about how you use your website, your Facebook page, and more.
- Use the data and evaluations you’ve conducted to gain insights about your audience. By thinking analytically about why certain campaigns perform well, you may see an opportunity to adjust your brand voice, positioning, and future promotions.
How To Start Adaptively Marketing Your Business
With the need to regularly evaluate results and optimize your marketing campaigns, not everyone is equipped to succeed with adaptive marketing strategies. Since it requires technical skills, industry knowledge, and creative problem solving, it can be time consuming for business owners to monitor and adapt their marketing.
Partnering with a full-service marketing agency is ideal to make the most of an adaptive marketing strategy. At Liquid Creative, adaptation is essential to our process. When you partner with us, we take time to understand your business, analyze your best performing campaigns, and even dig into third party research on your industry. With constant evaluation and regular updates, you’ll know your campaigns are being effectively optimized.
Learn more about how we can grow your business! As a full-service marketing agency, Liquid Creative can offer a full suite of services tailored to your goals. Contact us today to get started!
