Do you have a marketing strategy? If so, is it proactive or reactive? Not knowing could be negatively impacting your chances of success. Getting more leads doesn’t just mean sprucing up your website or getting a better-looking Instagram presence. To really stand out in your market, you have to use the right strategy.
We might not all want to wear turtlenecks tucked into jeans and name our businesses after edible fruits, but we can all learn a thing two from this guy:
“Some people say give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.” – Steve Jobs
What is a proactive marketing strategy?
Just from its name, you might be able to guess what a proactive strategy is: it involves thinking and planning ahead rather than reacting in the moment or after the fact.
Proactive marketing involves looking at research and data to delve into what’s happening in your industry and with your customers. This information then shapes your campaign. Then, in real time, you take a more flexible approach to adjust your strategy to increase your chances of success. This might sound ‘reactive’ but, trust us, it’s all part of the flexible proactive marketing approach 😉
A proactive marketing campaign is:
- Long-term & future-focused: anticipating events before they happen.
- Research & data driven: to find unmet market needs and even create new opportunities.
- Flexible: activities are adjusted as necessary while the campaign is still running – rather than waiting for the campaign to be over.
- Innovative: coming up with brand-new, data-driven ideas to delight your customers.
What are the benefits of a proactive marketing strategy?
When you choose to implement a proactive strategy, you go in with a more in-depth understanding of your customers’ wants and needs from the outset. By looking at your customer, your competition and how best to innovate in your market, you’ll solve problems for customers with relevant, useful solutions.
The innovation part is our absolute fave thing about proactive funnels. Why? Because rather than trying to predict (based on guesswork or Tarot cards) what new products or services your customers might want a few months from now, you use data to figure it out.
The data used to create innovative options for your customer ensures that you’re not just considering product, placement, price and promotion [aka the traditional Four Ps] but that you’re using real numbers to predict their latent, unsolved problems.
Still confused? Let’s look at reactive marketing
Reactive marketing is, well…reactive. Instead of predicting customers’ future needs, it responds to changes in the market – typically from your competition. One example is that you own a fitness brand and your competition hires a celebrity influencer to increase engagement on social media. You see this and do the same. You didn’t see it coming. You reacted.
The thing about reactive marketing is that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It also doesn’t have to involve copying your competitors. It can be reacting to anything external that you haven’t predicted, such as a shift in the market or an economic downturn.
What are the benefits of reactive marketing?
Trying to figure out your customers’ latent unsolved problems requires effort. It depends on data, time, and analysis. Reactive marketing, on the other hand:
- Is less time-consuming upfront.
- Requires no in-depth customer data collection.
- Can piggyback off current trends, making it more timely and relevant in the moment.
Are you waiting for something to happen?
The reason our team loves proactive marketing is that we believe that sitting around waiting for something to happen is NEVER as good as planning ahead. If you want to give you customers what they want, you HAVE to know who they are and how they behave. And when you solve problems they didn’t even know they had, you’ll see your profits climb.
If your sales funnel is looking more like a sales pancake, proactive marketing will turn your fate around.
Get in touch with our expert, lead-generating team to get started.
