by Ollie Stewart
Right now, marketers are struggling to respond effectively to the painful fire drills and time sensitive opportunities that are increasingly present in today’s landscape. The pressure to act quickly while avoiding costly mistakes can take a significant toll — impacting the quality of work, not to mention team morale. Marketing and communications teams need a more effective way to work together to create the visibility, alignment and efficiency required to do exceptional marketing in today’s complex economy.
At Opal, we’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most exceptional marketing and communication teams in the world. By implementing best practices and capabilities, many have developed useful systems enabling them to get it right time after time. Quick-strike marketing (a form of rapid response communication in which brands create content on the fly in response to real-world events or circumstances) is in every effective marketer’s playbook — especially since the events of 2020 have tested nearly every team’s crisis communications process.
Successful marketing teams know they need a solid strategy around strategic, first- and second-tiered campaigns (e.g. new product launches) and perhaps even for evergreen communications. But what happens when market forces pressure your team to produce high quality, quick-strike content at an accelerated pace? If you’re not planning in a platform that keeps your team in lock-step, it is nearly impossible to ensure messaging stays on brand with the real-time context to avoid disaster.
Teams who work in a platform purpose-built for alignment and efficiency are prepared for effective quick-strike marketing. Ensuring every stakeholder can easily weigh in and approve means the team can respond quickly in-market.
But what happens when your team doesn’t have the visibility and alignment required to move fast and be effective? Well, there are three likely scenarios:
- Your messaging and content is created in a dangerous echo chamber that may not resonate with your intended audience.
- The customer experience is inconsistent and out of sync with what came before or will come next.
- Key business partners are caught off-guard and left out of the approval process, which erodes confidence and team alignment.
Effective quick-strike muscle memory takes time to develop, refine, and sustain. Having a developed plan in place to respond quickly to events in market empowers your team with the confidence to make progress against your strategic goals, without having to take your eye off of the ball when new opportunities arise.
Here are some tips for managing your quick-strike marketing using Opal:
- Develop multiple scenarios to visualize flexible quick-strike executions for every channel and any situation.
- Create a dedicated “quick-strike” label in Opal to sort, filter and find content and messaging ready for quick review and approval.
- Activate workflow to keep track of your progress and streamline the process so nothing slips through the cracks or slows you down.
- Move faster by reducing complexity, eliminating silos and improving your team’s visibility, alignment and efficiency.
We know the consequences when teams are not foundationally organized: work is developed haphazardly, can miss the mark, may be misinterpreted, or never even make it to your intended audience. At Opal, we show up every day to bring marketing and communications teams exceptional marketing calendar capabilities that create unprecedented levels of visibility, build team alignment, and improve operational efficiency, because we don’t want this to happen to you.
Want to learn more about how your team can leverage the Opal marketing calendar for effective quick-strike marketing? Contact us today at solutions@workwithopal.com or forward this blog post to your colleagues who need help. We look forward to working with you!
