The Step Change Blog

Marketing without a plan is like trying to chop down a tree with a crowbar. You might get there in the end, but there’s a better way.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses operate in a time where attention is scarce and content is everywhere. Businesses who are serious about reaching out to their consumers are upping their game to win their attention.

Marketers are facing a dilemma today. On one hand, it’s becoming clear that creating content is not only an effective way to raise publicity for their companies, but it’s also essential to do so. On the other hand, so many companies are using content that consumers have become overexposed to.

The typical consumer sees hundreds of articles, blog posts, videos, and other forms of content per day and only manage to fully consume or remember a small fraction of them.

Unless your content marketing strategy can stand out from the rest, there’s no way to convert viewers and readers to consumers.

Sustainable competitive advantages are becoming harder to find and harder to maintain. There are really only 2 ways that you can define these. What are they?

The best marketers know when to make and not to make decisions. This is why understanding Behavioural Economics as a science of decision-making and looking into the human behaviour is a must for CMOs. Here are 6 Step Change-recommended books on Behavioural Economics that CMOs should be reading.

Throughout the Director’s Guide to Digital series, we’ve established the need for digital to be fully integrated into your marketing strategy. Still, you can’t add any real value to your digital marketing efforts until you can measure performance and track how digital has added to the success of your overall strategy.

If you think that email marketing is dead and that using email to reach your audience is an outdated approach, here are some statistics to prove that it’s here to stay and it’s not slowing down anytime in the future.

The heart of every business is human connections. At the end of the day, our work boils down to dealing with people: we exist to solve their problems and mitigate their pain points.

Former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts sheds light on essential matters like organisational growth, change, and creativity in this one-of-a-kind interview with Head of Strategy, Glenn Bartlett. This is the first post of the five-part video series. 

Many organisations today are under pressure in the relentless race of being ahead of the curve.

Whether it’s needing to enter new markets, achieve a sales breakthrough, expand margins, or deliver high-quality and low-cost products, businesses need to have an innovation imperative if they want to get ahead and stay relevant.

Public relations is a very important tool when you want to build brand awareness and be recognised as an expert. But is it right for your business now?

In 2017, a mattress war exploded when local mattress seller Koala threw massive shade at high-end bedding giant De Rucci. If you’ve been travelling from Sydney to Melbourne, you may have seen these somewhere near the airports...

KitKat wasn’t always the behemoth brand that it is today. It used to be floating around with all other Nestlé products, struggling to gain traction and make a name for itself. Like KitKat, many businesses often have a great idea or product but often find it difficult to get people to buy. Because the truth is, it’s often the best marketing, and not the best product, that wins.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Reserve Bank of Australia are predicting continued strong growth for the Australian economy this year. Businesses all throughout Australia have much to celebrate and look forward to.

If you’re a business owner waiting for the right time to maximise your bottom line or shift your focus this year to driving long-term value while increasing revenue, now may be just the time.

Let me start by thanking all our clients who have given us the chance to prove this and believed in us. You know who you are.

Many still believe that some of today’s modern marketing techniques, particularly in digital, just won’t work when communicating with government departments.

To this, we say: Rubbish!

Digital marketing knows no bounds. And when we talk about modern marketing techniques that can be used in government, these can refer to content marketing, performance media, social media marketing, and marketing automation, amongst others.

Here’s why we think digital has a place in government.

We recently surveyed 133 CEOs, Directors of Marketing and Sales, and CMOs to find out where companies are likely to invest for growth. 

We found that most young executives are aiming to increase investment across the board more than older executives. We also found it interesting that smaller cities like Adelaide are more adventurous in terms of virtual reality or augmented reality than Sydney or Melbourne.

The highlight of our survey reveals the key areas where business leaders plan to invest to grow their businesses this year.

So you’ve produced a great video explainer that will help your target audience easily understand what it is that you do. You’ve thought about where to strategically embed it on your website to gain traction. You had it pinned on top of your social media account. You shared the link to your team.

Now all that’s left to do is track its success.

But how do you know your message is getting across? What key metrics should you be looking at?

In an ever-changing and highly competitive digital environment, not having a solid digital marketing campaign is a lost opportunity to attract new leads, engage your audience, and drive them through the funnel for actual conversion.

Still, so many businesses out there do not have a digital marketing strategy or know how to run an effective marketing campaign online. 

The Chief Financial Officer is a key player in any organisation and is someone you need to successfully engage with if you want to create positive change in an organisation. A CFO can be your biggest ally — or your greatest nemesis.

With our popcorn boxes ready and our digital thinking caps on, we stepped into The Dendy for Step Change Movie Night last week. We welcomed more than 200 clients and friends — our biggest audience ever.

There are many different ways to launch a new brand, and any one of them can jumpstart your products from scratch. But it helps to take inspiration from some of the world’s greatest strategists because, after all, their success has been tried and tested.

With today’s digital space overloaded with so much content, cutting through the noise is only half the battle won.

You need to get your audience to complete the content engagement hierarchy to drive actual conversion.

On a degree of difficulty scale, marketing prescription pharmaceuticals rates high on the list. It’s an industry like no other — categorised by heavy restrictions, a shed load of data, and an audience that is limited and hugely intelligent.

To top that off, there’s also limited time to monetise the new drug before generics flood the market.

So in a few short years, your marketing campaigns need to shift choice away from the incumbent, educate those at the upper end of the knowledge chain, build brand loyalty and value above just price, and remain within the confines of the MA code.

It’s not a task for the faint of heart.

We have recently seen an interplay between design and business strategy in the digital landscape. With key players setting the pace for how we can tailor design towards the user experience, we then ask, does it really make a difference?

Growing a business is hard in the best of times. However, in the worst of times, such as the conditions found during a recession, growing a business is next to impossible unless the right strategy is developed.

A prime example is the modern-day Great Recession where more than 170,000 small businesses closed their doors between 2008 and 2010, according to the US Census Bureau.

While the loss of over three million small-business jobs was catastrophic for many individuals, there is an opportunity to learn lessons in an effort to remain prepared should a future lengthy recession occur.

The Practice of Powerful Presence is a series of concepts and exercises that let you consistently bring out the best in you so you can be the best leader for others.

The next Powerful Presence is in Adelaide on 24th - 26th August. Register Here. 

This is not another leadership tool or app you can simply download — it’s the complete operating system you need if you want to think clearly, think creatively, be powerfully present, and have an edge in your communications.

If you can’t simply define management and leadership then you can’t hope to be effective at either. We’ve got it down to a word for each. At the end of this article you should be able to see what great looks like — no matter what side of the divide you come down on.

Marketing has changed. It used to be a distinct element of an organisation with a simple focus: getting goods and services from concept to customer.

But the world has changed, and so too must the way we view marketing.

As silos crumble around us and the world becomes more connected, integrated, and seamless, it’s becoming harder to see where one thing ends and another begins.

Which is why marketing needs a rethink.

And that rethink starts with a new definition.

Big data has been described as the “new oil” as far as business assets go. However, a better analogy might be the Wild West. It is fairly easy for any business to now leverage BI and data to make decisions; however, the “how” still isn’t clear, and neither is the application. 

According to KPMG, when the strategy is data-driven, it helps to make sense of structured and unstructured data and applies that knowledge to a wide range of business functions. The result is that there is no more guess work, and results can become more predictable. Far more predictable than conventional forecasting techniques based on static historical financial reports.

Today’s dynamic global economy has us facing a challenging task of steering our organisations towards success.

The stress from rising competition and regulation, resource management, revenue generation, and customer retention only shows that we have the toughest jobs in the market.

Webinars deliver tremendous value both to the business and the audience. It’s a great and cut-through way to share, engage, connect, and educate your audience wherever they are in the world. That’s why we’ve always been fans of webinars.

Recently, Step Change had the privilege of leveraging the power of webinars.

Our CEO, Ashton Bishop, presented “Predatory Marketing: Repositioning the Competition to Build Business” to 76 CEOs, CMOs, and Marketing Directors for a series powered by GoToWebinar.