Can You Scale Your Business Prospects Without Taking On Risk?
Every business leader eventually faces the question of how much marketing risk is truly necessary for growth.
As a marketing professional, I know how we reach customers is changing fast. A core marketing principle is reach. Many people mistake this for database size alone. But brand awareness happens outside the channels you own. What was once easy to identify and manage now feels overwhelming and siloed.
What I learned twenty years ago about executing campaigns and choosing channels barely applies today. Entire channels have disappeared, such as direct mail and B2B print publications. Marketers live in a world of risk. What worked yesterday may not work today. Whole channels can vanish overnight. So how do you keep your reach with customers and prospects?
Give Your Team Space to Learn and Experiment
Don’t leave your team flat-footed. Give them room to play with new mediums and channels. Have them get a head start on AI. It’s changing both employee productivity and buyer behavior. Encourage them to test how AI can improve their work. Also have them test AI in buyer scenarios, researching your products or services the way a prospect would. What is AI telling them? What is it leaving out? Is your positioning holding up in this new space?
Social media is shifting too. Organic reach is declining as display algorithms change. LinkedIn users report missing their connections’ posts or seeing content that’s weeks old. Keep testing different post styles. Are videos still performing? Do links in comments help? Are comments appearing at all? Beyond organic, start allocating more budget to paid social. LinkedIn still holds a large community of business owners and mid- to junior-level professionals. Paid campaigns are the most reliable way to reach them now.
Email feels stable, but it isn’t. Do you know how recent deliverability changes affect your campaigns? Does your sender profile include an image? Are your emails ADA-compliant? Are you landing in the primary tab? When did you last clean your list? Email is still one of the most-used marketing channels, but staying visible in a crowded inbox takes constant attention. Apple’s Mail changes have also broken open-rate tracking for iPhone users. Open rates were always an imperfect metric. Now we know for certain we’re losing data on a large segment of readers. If email is part of your strategy, stay current on the latest deliverability rules.
Play Both Your A Game and Your B Game
Don’t rely solely on channels that worked in the past. Look at your best-performing campaigns. Now ask yourself: are you also investing in new channels that are gaining traction? This matters as the marketplace keeps shifting. If your go-to channel starts to decline, you need a backup. Do you have one?
Test, test, test. Form a hypothesis about where your ideal customers are now. Find a low-cost way to run that test. Execute it and measure the results. Did the test confirm your hypothesis? If yes, bring it to your leadership team and discuss scaling. If not, go back to the drawing board and try again.
Technology Won’t Lower Your Marketing Risk
I love technology. There are a lot of genuinely exciting tools out there. But no tool makes up for a lack of reach to your ideal customer. Companies are investing in tools to understand how customers interact with their brand. At the same time, customers are using new technologies to research providers on their own. We’re moving toward a zero-touch environment. By the time a prospect reaches out, they’ve already done their research. They’re ready to confirm whether you solve their problem.
Technology investment carries no guaranteed return. Most of those costs are operational, not audience reach. Don’t fall into analysis paralysis. And don’t rely on backward-looking analytics to predict new channel performance. If there’s no history to report against, the data can’t help you.
Take on Marketing Risk for Your Brand
Stop expecting the same results year over year. The marketplace keeps changing. Where buyers once turned to a Google search, they now get answers from AI. Optimizing what you’ve already done won’t drive growth. Try new channels. Try new messages. Test, measure, and adjust. Marketing has always been about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Keep testing, and find out how the new marketing landscape will receive yours.