What are the benefits of being bold and innovative in your marketing? Mobas Director Adam Tuckwell explores why 2023 might be the year for brave marketers.
As budgets are set and plans are drawn up for businesses 2023 marketing activities, what type of marketer do you want to be? One who plays it safe and sticks to tried and tested tactics or one who is prepared to innovate, try new things and break the mould?
Innovation and experimentation are reliant on trying new things. Facebook’s famous mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ encourages a culture of innovation, yet marketers are often fearful of breaking the mould. In a world ruled by analytics and careful monitoring of ROI, how can we overcome the fear of failure to become more innovative? How can we be braver as brands in what we do?
Do you have a healthy attitude to failure and taking risks? Irrespective of your marketing discipline or role, being a successful marketer requires more than just working the job: it requires a sense of pride and passion for the marketing world. It requires a broad knowledge of the technological breakthroughs, as well as the processes that create successful campaigns for companies, products and clients.
Innovation is a hot topic, but many will be reluctant due to truly innovate their working practices due to a fear of failure. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn and unless people and organisations manage to keep learning as fast as the world is changing, they’ll never keep growing and evolving. But that means making some big decisions and sometimes day-to-day marketing can be stressful enough.
The problem with modern-day marketing is that, under increasing pressure to get results, we’re often too scared to fail in order to achieve success. Everyone wants to be innovative, but no one wants to make mistakes – those two things don’t work in tandem.
To make a change, we need to create a culture in our organisations where failure and missteps can be understood and embraced in order to advance. Often the more senior we become, the more risk-averse we are. We simply have more to lose. Naturally, when we innovate and try new things, things will go wrong, sometimes they go wrong on a small scale, while other times they’ll blow up massively!
We need to understand when and where to experiment based on our organisation. Ask any of the most innovative brands about their success and they’ll likely tell you of twice as many more significant mistakes they’ve made in the past, but they all have one thing in common – they’ve learned from it, never quit and were prepared to take that risk of uncertainty in order to get ahead.
It’s easy to say ‘failure isn’t an option’ – but short-term failures are vital towards learning, especially within marketing. Once you can understand that, then you’ll realise that avoiding failure in the short term may not be a good thing, but if you truly embrace a fail-to-learn mindset you can make sure that long-term failure isn’t an option!
If you need help with your marketing plans for the new year or guidance on what channels and tactics you could be using, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Mobas team.
