If there’s one responsibility of the marketing department that the next few years may shake up most, it’s in the area of strategy.
Yesterday’s article addressing the future of B2B marketing generated some encouraging feedback from readers, so I thought I’d extend the discussion for the rest of the week to look at how forthcoming changes could impact different areas of marketing activity. Let’s go!
We’ve looked at the activities of a marketing department before, so this should be a great basis for investigating activities one at a time. We’ll talk about them as follows:
- Strategy and planning
- Market research and intelligence
- Advertising
- PR and media relations
- Exhibitions, conferences and events
- Direct marketing
- Literature and collateral
- Websites and online marketing
- Internal communications
- Miscellaneous responsibilities
1. Strategy and Planning
If there’s one responsibility of the marketing department that the next few years may shake up more than any other, it’s in the area of strategy. Marketing planning has always been a mixture of educated guesswork and experience, but Ai adds a new dimension.
The conversations many of us are having now are about how to prepare for a future that’s not just unclear, but unpredictable. The general view is that this means strategy has to be less about detailed, multi-year roadmaps and more about resilience: ensuring that people, processes, and budgets are flexible enough to pivot quickly.
One immediate implication is training. A marketing team that hasn’t invested in getting everyone comfortable with Ai tools will soon find itself at a serious disadvantage. This is not (only) about saving time or creating more content faster. It’s about enabling individuals to recognise opportunities as they arise, whether that’s an emerging channel, a new Google advertising format, or Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) techniques.
Another shift in strategy comes from the decline of the third-party platforms we used to use for visibility: trade press, exhibitions and online forums or social media. As these fade, the focus has to be for us to become the primary source of information for customers. That means planning how we’re going to own the channels and the conversations ourselves, rather than paying for neutral intermediaries to do it.
In short, the marketing plan of the near future will look less like a static concept and more of what I’ve seen described as “a developing playbook”, centred on people who are trained and allowed to move quickly.
Tomorrow: Market research and intelligence