How contemporary is your marketing? (A 31-point checklist)

Audiences evolve. Media evolves. Channels evolve. Technology evolves.
Unless your marketing efforts evolve as a response to all of this, your brand will be outrun by dynamic competitors.
The marketing strategies that made you rock a couple of years ago may not be relevant today and it is important to constantly ensure that your marketing function stays on top of things.
In this article, we are going to list down 31 questions that will help Senior Marketing Leaders check to see if their marketing strategies are contemporary or not.
In fact these are the exactly the same ‘discovery questions’ that we administer to every prospect that consults with us.
Let’s get started.
A Checklist to Level Up Marketing Strategies
- You have absolute clarity about the audience that you want to target
- You digital campaigns consists of both brand campaigns and lead generation campaigns
- You are able to constantly grow your search traffic every month
- Video is an important component in your marketing
- You run campaigns specifically targeting mobile audiences
- You regularly post content on social media and respond to audience comments
- You run paid search and paid social campaigns
- You run programmatic display campaigns
- Your paid advertising efforts include channels other than Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat
- Your customer-targeting criteria on paid campaigns extend beyond demographic details
- You engage with influencers and affiliates to market your products and services
- You deliberately make efforts to optimize Return on Ad Spends (ROAS)
- You have a well thought-out creative strategy for retargeting campaigns rather than just a “Buy Now CTA”
- You are able to de-anonymize portal visitors while adhering to their privacy and are compliant with GDPR, HIPPA and other guidelines
- You are able to determine the intent of each portal visitor and provide personalized content to them
- You develop marketing strategies to retarget portal visitors outside the portal and influence them to convert
- You have stopped being reliant on Data Management Platforms to acquire new customers
- You run experiments on your portal to test and validate experiences
- All decisions on your portal are driven by analytics
- You constantly monitor everything from overall traffic to leads generated and regularly take efforts to optimize conversion
- You score leads generated from your portal and paid ads and run nurturing campaigns to convert them
- You have a unified view of your prospects and customers across channels
- You market to your existing customers
- Your marketing campaigns to existing customers extend beyond cross-sell and cover the entire customer lifecycle
- Your segmentation criteria for campaigns is based on behaviours and not just your customers’ demographics and product ownership data
- You are able to micro-segment customers, determine a unique marketing action for each and execute campaigns targeting them
- Your campaign strategies are flexible enough to exclude non-responsive customers from specific campaigns and move them to others
- You have a strategy in place to prevent your customers from getting campaign fatigue
- You have the ability to reach customers with the same message on all channels (Omnichannel) that you use to interact with them.
- You have a scalable creative function to support these campaigns with Omnichannel-creative
- You capture contact and response details and use machine learning models to optimize campaign responses
Summing up
Enterprise marketing involves a ton of activities that have to be executed simultaneously and it is very easy for brands to ignore a few of them for want of time, lack of skills or technology, or just plain ignorance.
When you honestly answer each of the above questions, it is quite easy for you to spot the areas in your marketing that require improvement and formulate a successful marketing strategy