4 Catalant Experts Improve Marketing ROI For Clients
Ongoing change, market volatility, and the global pandemic are just a few reasons why people’s behaviors, experiences, and perspectives have changed drastically over the last few years. That’s why marketers have been forced to find new ways to reach and engage their target audiences.
For example, digital transformation — which was already well underway pre-pandemic — shifted into overdrive as customers were forced to do everything (e.g. work, shop, bank, learn, stream entertainment) digitally. Marketers followed suit with digital-first engagement strategies. They pivoted their messaging and preferred channels (goodbye live events and hello webinars) due to the global pandemic. Meanwhile, marketers who stayed the course with pre-pandemic strategies faced a wave of unsubscribes and other forms of customer pushback.
In addition to shifting customer expectations, data privacy regulations and restrictions around online tracking and cookies forced marketers to engage customers in new ways.
Improve Marketing ROI with an Agile Marketing Strategy
With these substantial changes came a need for marketers to invest in an agile strategy. Agile marketers are ready to respond to change quickly, adapt to emerging trends and opportunities, and execute plans that improve ROI.
Marketing agility isn’t just a mindset. It is a business capability that allows your team to sense and respond to evolving circumstances. It’s about tailored messaging, personalized experiences, and the effective use of marketing technology. For example, an agile platform like Catalant can be leveraged by your team to hire experienced, independent consultants who are ready to quickly provide value and help you maintain a competitive advantage.
4 Catalant Experts Improve Marketing ROI For Clients
Here are four independent consultants businesses have hired through Catalant in the past to help their marketing teams make agile decisions and efficiently execute new strategies.
1. Xavier Fontaine
Xavier Fontaine heads a Paris-based independent consulting business that helps global companies grow and meet shifting customer expectations through market research and strategy.
Fontaine was able to help a chocolate company expand its product line in order to reduce challenges around product seasonality. “Chocolate sales are seasonal, with more people consuming chocolate in the colder months,” he said. Fontaine helped develop a new go-to-market strategy for ice cream, which sells more in the warmer months, by researching market trends and developing a deep understanding of the client’s capabilities and their resources.
2. Carolina Uribe
Carolina Uribe is a corporate strategy consultant who helps clients grow into areas that are adjacent to their existing business or by finding new business opportunities.
Uribe helped shape the global innovation agenda for a leading soft-drink provider. She was challenged to help the organization grow globally and get out of a limiting mentality related to regulations on the sugar content in their beverages. Uribe helped the beverage company launch new products leading with health-conscious innovations that enabled the company to expand its global market.
3. Margo Diewald
Margo Diewald performs market and voice-of-the-customer research to help Marketing and Sales teams better understand their markets and customer perception of their offerings.
Diewald has conducted human-centered design interviews for a Fortune 50 company’s software automation product, testing sessions for a regional household goods manufacturer, and concept testing sessions for a toy manufacturer.
“Maybe you’re bringing a new product or service to market, or you’ve got some small and nimble, but well-funded startups taking away your market share or reducing your margins — those are good moments for conducting voice of customer research,” Diewald explains. This type of research helps the businesses she works with understand what’s happening in their market and informs necessary changes to their go-to-market strategy.
4. Donald Hawthorne
Donald Hawthorne is a go-to-market (GTM) and market research consultant who helps his clients understand evolving market demands and address them through innovation.
Hawthorne helped a client build a capability to understand markets and respond to market changes with product and service offerings that address the evolving needs of their target audience.
Hawthorne says this is an important exercise due to the fact, “We’ve moved from a world that used to be about gaining sustained competitive advantages, where companies could leverage advantages for an extended period of time, to the current world of transient advantages, where you don’t maintain competitive advantages for as long.” Hawthorne says this is because market conditions and customer expectations change so rapidly.