Marketing your way through big moments of change

Good marketers know how to impose change on the world — by influencing people to think, feel or do something they might not have done otherwise.

But it’s when the world imposes change on marketers that the best really stand out — by outmaneuvering competitors clinging to what’s worked in the past.

We’ve written a lot this year about the big shift happening in B2B marketing (and what to do about it). The short version is that the traditional playbook is faltering and marketing effectiveness is hitting a brick wall — targets are climbing as investment flatlines and performance falls off a cliff.

In parallel, Jay Acunzo and Rand Fishkin noodled on a pretty compelling list of macroeconomic factors causing everything to feel kind of soupy right now:

• The post-COVID Bump and Slump (we’re in the doldrums after a false dawn)
• The end of cheap money (less borrowing and investment)
• The long tail of the internet boom (everyone who can be online now is)
• Massive growth disparity (most growth is localized to tech giants)

Add this report from ebsta and Pavilion — which found that new business deals in 2024 are harder to win, slower to convert and smaller in size than they used to be — and the picture gets bleak.

Bigger targets. Fewer buyers. Smaller budgets. Tired tactics. More competition.

It’s a perfect storm of disruptive forces poised to impose a lot of change on companies that don’t change first.

And the problem with the current marketing effectiveness crisis is that it could undermine marketing’s ability to steward the business through a critical (and imminent) inflection point.

Is it bad timing for marketing to lead the business through change?

It’s understandable why marketing confidence is low right now. And on the surface, the timing couldn’t look worse, for a couple of reasons.

First, companies make big moves when things feel this volatile — repositioning the offer, shaking up the org chart, refreshing the brand, and so on.

Second, marketing is going through its own identity crisis, with prominent voices asking big questions about whether the traditional playbook is fit for purpose anymore (like, y’know, the guy who wrote it).

Companies are on the verge of generational inflection points right as marketers are being asked to rethink some of the foundational principles that’ve underpinned their operation for over a decade.

Say you’re acquiring another business (or being acquired). How do you navigate all the complexity that entails (bringing multiple brands, offers and stories into one coherent proposition) while also addressing the brand and demand imbalance that’s been hurting performance all along?

Or maybe you’re about to pivot into a new market or release a new product. Is now really the time to also roll-out a shiny new Go-To-Market process?

Here’s the thing (don’t get mad). Big moments of change are a great time to rethink your marketing.

Big marketing moves in big moments of change

The truth is, we’ve always done our best work when clients are going through big, existential inflection points.

We’ve written about 9 big moments of change here — along with how we help companies like you make the most of them.

Moments like these are potent because it’s typically when marketing has the biggest remit, ample resources and confident executive sponsorship to influence the trajectory of the company.

It’s also usually because the business tacitly acknowledges that what’s worked before isn’t built for the complexity of new challenges ahead — that what got you here won’t take you there.

Marketers are being challenged to get real about whether conventional inbound activities meaningfully build pipeline and revenue. And sooner or later these calls are going to collide with an existential moment of company-wide change forced by ratcheting commercial pressure.

But it’d be a mistake to decouple the businesses’ big moment of change from the evolution of your marketing operation.

Carrying an inbound playbook into the new world in the name of short-term continuity squanders your best shot to disentangle yourself from an MQL treadmill that pays you back less every year.

Marketers don’t need to hit pause on self-reflection — they need something practical to channel it through.

And if external conditions are anything to go by, there are plenty of big change moments on the horizon that could be the perfect catalyst to reinvent your marketing operation.