Navigating the Temptation: Shiny Object Syndrome vs. Staying True to Your Business Strategies

Trends constantly come and go, but some have staying power. Effective business strategies aren’t immune to being threatened by new tools, tactics, and best practices. Consider how many “shiny objects,” or new business strategies, cross your radar each month, from fancy acronyms full of buzzwords to new SaaS tools—and let’s not forget the quick-win tactics your competitors are using.

Getting sidetracked by new ideas floating around is all too easy. Is the trend just another distraction? Or is it a valid, potentially game-changing strategy? 

Let’s take a look at how you can determine if you should stay true to your current business strategies or try out new tactics and—most importantly—how to measure the success of your new approach.

Game-Changing Strategy or Shiny Object?

One of the key parts of being a leader is making the right decisions at the right time, knowing when to pivot and when to follow your original strategy. But when several different ideas frequently cross your path, it can be challenging to know if you should stay the course or try out some of these new business strategies.

Balance Innovation and Your Established Strategy

Keeping things fresh and exciting is important, but frequently adopting new business strategies can give marketing teams and customers whiplash. Striking a balance between adopting new strategies and following your established strategy is key. 

To strike a balance between the two, regularly evaluate your strategies against industry trends and customer feedback. Remember that innovative business strategies shouldn’t be adopted just for the sake of novelty—they must offer tangible improvements or be a solution to a current challenge, and they should also align with your revenue goals.

Maintaining a portfolio approach is beneficial to balancing innovation and established strategies. Allocate a percentage of your resources to tried-and-tested strategies (approximately 70-80 percent), then allocate a much smaller, calculated portion to experimental tactics. This enables you to test out some innovative tactics without jeopardizing your core strategy.

Distinguishing Between a Game Changer and a Shiny Object

Is a trend a short-lived fad or something with true staying power? To help distinguish between the two, evaluate new tactics based on their long-term value rather than their level of hype. A game-changing strategy should:

• Offer substantial improvements in efficiency, market position, or customer satisfaction
• Have a sustainable impact
• Align with your core business objectives

How to Evaluate and Align New Marketing Tactics with Your Business Strategy

When you’re considering a new strategy, ask yourself: “How does this tactic align with my overall goals?” Let’s take a look at how you can determine the answer.

Conduct a Thorough Analysis

Start by thoroughly analyzing how the new tactic fits within your strategic framework. Explore how the tactic supports your company’s mission, vision, and long-term objectives.

Every new marketing tactic you consider has an opportunity cost, which means you need to evaluate what value you’re gaining from incorporating the new tactic versus staying true to your existing business strategies. If you replace your old tactics with new tactics, what are the long-term implications for your company?

Consider the Impact

When you’re evaluating long-term implications, there are several factors you should consider, including potential ROI, alignment with your business objectives, resource availability, and the potential impact on the customer experience.

Also, consider the scalability and sustainability of new tactics in the long term. Keep in mind that most tactics that work well are going to be copied by competitors at some point, so the maximum shelf life value of your new tactic could be as little as 3–12 months.

Run a Risk-Benefit Analysis

Before finalizing the addition of any new strategies, conduct a risk-benefit analysis that includes:

• Potential impact on your company’s reputation
• Financial implications
• Resource allocation
• Market reactions

Scenario planning can also be beneficial here and enable your company to foresee various outcomes and prepare accordingly. 

Adhere to Your Brand Guidelines

The last thing you want to do while incorporating new tactics is compromise your brand integrity. All companies should have a clear and well-defined brand guidelines document that all marketing, sales, or customer success strategies must adhere to. To ensure everyone understands and upholds these guidelines, provide regular training and communication across departments.

Getting customer feedback on how your tactics are perceived is also important. Remember that just because something aligns with your brand guidelines doesn’t mean other factors won’t have a detrimental effect on your brand.

Eliminate Confusion

Customers often develop an affinity for a brand. Therefore, to maintain customers’ trust, shifts that drastically affect the customer experience should be accompanied by a campaign that explains the reasons for the change as well as the benefits of the change. Keep feedback channels open to promptly address customer concerns or confusion. 

You don’t necessarily need to send customers a presentation about your new strategy, but if you’re introducing a new product, acquisition, or marketing channel, then you should share it with your customers if it impacts them. Also, consider making these announcements multichannel. Not all of your customers read your newsletter; some may see your news only via a press release or on social media.

Measuring the Success of Your New Marketing Strategies

Once you’ve incorporated a new marketing strategy, the next step is to evaluate its success. Compare it to predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your overall objectives. Some KPIs you could consider include pipeline generation, customer engagement, conversion rates, deal velocity, ROI, brand awareness, or Net Promoter Score. 

Regular monitoring and analysis of your KPIs is essential to determining how effective your new tactics are. One of the keys to this is using real-time reporting so you can see the immediate impact of the change in your approaches.

One of the top concerns of implementing new strategies is how to determine when to pivot because it isn’t yielding the desired results. First, you should have clear benchmarks and timelines set for your new strategies. If these benchmarks aren’t met within a reasonable period, it may be time to pivot. This decision should be based on data-driven insights and market feedback, not purely on immediate results within the first few days of unveiling your new strategy.

Your Guiding Light for Success

Data is king. It’s essential in proving your marketing efforts’ success or determining when you need to shift gears. The problem is that sorting through pages and pages of reports to determine what success looks like isn’t just time-consuming—it’s also daunting.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Find out how to maximize your marketing dashboard and prove that your marketing contributions are worth every penny with our resource, Turning Your CMO Marketing Dashboard into a Revenue-Generating Machine.