However, no matter how volatile the times are, marketers must adapt and prioritise meeting their company’s sales plans and business goals at all costs. If it’s impossible to build a solid long-term strategy, learning to be more flexible and cautious is essential. Here’s how we managed to reach a 3.75% Conversion Rate and a 68% Approval Rate in CATCH, compared to the average 1.5-2% with an anchor-based framework, accurate analytics, and bot detection, that helps maintain mobility, yet not get washed away by market fluctuations.   

Prepare the chains

It all starts with preparing a chain that will hold your boat on an anchor – a marketing budget. The longer the chain, the more room for manoeuvre a marketer has. However, the reality is that today we have to act under considerably tighter budgets than we did about 10 years ago.

The classic 70/20/10 marketing budget distribution scheme allocates 70% for proven tactics, 20% for innovative strategies, and 10% for experiments. This indicates that 30% of the cash pool should be dedicated to testing hypotheses. In practice, it may take up to 60% or even 70% of the budget to figure out the most effective tactics.

To achieve higher conversion rates, marketers have to maximise their budget utilisation by relying more on proven schemes and use cases and less on experimental initiatives, especially during periods of high product demand. 

Prepare the anchors

Since product demand levels fluctuate significantly throughout the year, it makes sense to identify three major periods when the demand for your type of goods is highest and allocate most of the marketing budget accordingly. 

For example, if you sell power generators, consider targeting events like Burning Man instead of Amazon Prime Days, when portable electricity generators are most requested. Black Friday – Cyber Monday Sales, along with thematic holidays like Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. also show spikes in customer activity. 

According to a Deloitte survey, 2024 recorded the highest spending rates during the BFCM period, with an average transaction value of $650 per customer. Make sure your product is visible to your audience these key days. 

Prepare the boat

Before setting out to sea, make sure your boat is ready. The equipment you need will depend on the waters you plan to travel. The same principle applies to your messages and target audiences. 

Audience segmentation is impossible without advanced traffic analytics capable of accurately detecting bot traffic. While they may seem like a low-damage evil, bots can not only affect the accuracy of your analytics but also make your system vulnerable to cyberattacks, data stealth, and content scraping.

Proper analytics will help you better understand where to find your clients and identify what concerns them at the moment. Different generations of internet users have more or less distinct needs and pain points, so open-access marketing surveys and use cases may be particularly helpful there. 

Black Swans

A one-year plan is sufficient to identify major milestones while preserving valuable flexibility in the case of Black Swans. Since 2020, Black Swans have been appearing in flocks, making marketers cautious and always ready to react. 

Among the most recent examples is the mass exodus of American internet users to RedNote, the Chinese analog of TikTok, due to the app’s upcoming ban in the USA (which has now been reversed). In almost one night, millions of users rushed to the previously unfamiliar platform, and marketers had to follow them immediately.

Though Black Swans are nearly impossible to predict, it’s important to be prepared for unexpected situations and have some extra budget to avoid missed opportunities.

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