The world is changing right in front of our eyes. Two years ago, we were marketing on Facebook, last year on Instagram, and this year on TikTok. With the constant rate at which marketing channels are evolving, staying on top of digital marketing trends is absolutely key to your brand’s success.
If you want to future-proof your brand’s marketing strategy, there are a couple of things that you should be doing, according to digital marketing sensation Alessio Pieroni.
As the founder of the highly successful digital marketing agency Scale for Impact, Alessio knows a thing or two about how to design a thriving long-term digital marketing strategy. Alessio formerly served as the CMO of Mindvalley, the highly successful digital publishing company, which is where he began to refine his digital marketing and advertising skills. Alessio also previously worked at Apple, and he is a resident professor at Ninja Marketing, Italy’s biggest school of marketing.
This year Alessio has combined his multiple learning into a comprehensive book Exponential Marketing – a must read for any marketing pro from digital influencer to an executive.
Read on to discover some of Alessio’s expert insight on how you can create a digital marketing strategy that will prove successful year after year.
Always Question Your Strategies
It can be easy to land on a marketing strategy that seems to be working and settle into a routine. But to create a strategy that will thrive year after year, you must be constantly asking yourself, “could we be doing this better?”
There is a motto that Alessio and his team always reference: “First you nail it, then you scale it.” You must always be asking yourself, “can we scale up this process?” For example, perhaps you are currently marketing on a given social media platform, and though you’ve had great success and the platform remains relevant, other platforms are rapidly emerging.
This would be a good moment to take a look at your social media strategy and research what you could be doing differently to augment growth even more.
Get Comfortable Experimenting
Once you’ve taken a good look at your current strategies and have identified what new approaches you should adopt, you should get ready to dive in! You never know if something will work until you try, and the only way to do this is by experimenting.
However, experimenting does not mean choosing every new shining object, like a new platform. Design an experiment where you are clear on your base metric and can measure the experiment’s impact on it. One of the biggest parts of the scale-up process is trying new approaches.
And if you’re not already an expert on everything you’re going to implement, don’t worry about it! Future-proofing a marketing strategy is a constant learning process, and the great part about experimenting is that you don’t have to know everything right away.
Be Ready to Analyze Everything
All of this reflection and experimentation is useless if your processes and results go unanalyzed. A huge part of designing a successful digital marketing strategy is analyzing what works and what doesn’t, and growth hacking must always be data-driven.
And you shouldn’t just be looking at whether a certain strategy was a success or a failure, but also why it worked or didn’t work. And analyzing the “why” behind your successes is just as important as looking into why something failed.
In the words of one of Alessio’s childhood football coaches, “after a loss, we analyze the weaknesses so next time we can win…but the mistake is to win without looking at what you did wrong.”
It is critical to analyze what went wrong when a strategy fails, but it is also indispensable that you take the time to look at what went right when an experiment worked. Only when you do that will you be able to successfully implement it in the future.
Learn to Deal with Failure
Finally, this one is something that all growth hackers and digital marketers need to get used to hearing: you are going to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re doing something wrong, because this means that you’re not pushing the limits of your marketing strategy enough.
If you can learn how to appreciate your failures and grow from them rather than dwell on setbacks, losses, and frustration, then you will get ahead far quicker than someone with a less open-minded approach to growth hacking.
So while it’s important to celebrate your wins, it is also important to appreciate and learn from your losses, as this means that you are trying and growing. We can’t all expect to be experts in everything that we try, especially when we’re talking about staying ahead of digital trends. So staying realistic and empathetic with yourself is key if you want to avoid burnout and disappointment.
Combine this growth hacking mindset with perseverance, and motivation, you can absolutely future-proof your digital marketing strategy. Growth hacking is about constant evolution, and you should strive to be better every single day. Once you embark on this journey, you’ll be asking yourself why you didn’t start years ago.
