Having worked in many different industries, you quickly learn the potential to mix strategies for improvements across different product and service types.
A great example is in the optical industry – trying to sell eyewear online is very similar to selling shoes online. Borrowing tactics from Zappos and observing how customers navigate the buying process at a retail shoe store was able to drive innovative tactics in online eyewear sales from virtual try-on tools to how the marketing department found affiliates and influencers.
Let’s explore why all marketers should consider using interdisciplinary marketing strategies.
Why Marketers Should Use Cross-Industry Innovation
The biggest benefit of cross-industry innovation is breaking the echo chamber. Too many companies limit innovation by basing their marketing tactics and strategies off their competitors or “that’s the way it’s always been done.”
In Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne have the famous quote, “The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.” Marketers can redefine their niche in a variety of ways –
- Map out customer pain points and needs through empathy and customer journey maps. Survey adjacent and non-competing industries that share, or have solved, similar issues
- Use cross-industry benchmarking – study successful marketing departments outside of your field and test which strategies can be shifted to your niche
- Bring your team together to have brainstorming sessions and complete a SWOT analysis on cross-industry businesses that most align with your niche
Mixing Customer Journeys from Different Sectors
A good example of how marketing can borrow ideas is in customer journeys. Some industries have nailed different customer journeys, and these ideas can be lifted and used across sectors. Here are a few –
- Healthcare has lifecycle marketing locked down. Emails are sent at the exact time when care is needed. A text message follow-up hits when there is no email response. Direct mail pieces further enhance the customer’s journey when critical care is needed. Taking CRM strategies from healthcare, where patients and customers are tracked through every phase of life, would be a big lifecycle boost to CPG’s, retail, ecommerce, and other sectors
- Fantasy sports use gamification and loyalty programs to drive engagement and take free users to paid users at a high rate. A company focused on fitness or education could use these tactics to increase paid users
- Let’s be honest, most chat bots are annoying. However, the hospitality industry has done an excellent job using a concierge-style chatbot to help people complete their booking, vacation planning, and other conversion points. A luxury brand could easily replicate this with a smart chatbot that doesn’t annoy, but walks their users through the journey with a VIP experience
Using Product Design Principles in Marketing
When in-house, launching Agile Marketing with OKRs drove the marketing department forward more than any operational change the marketing department ever made. Toss in an MVP approach to ad testing and content creation and the marketing department saw double and triple the quantity and quality of production within 12-18 months.
Stealing some ideas from IT, agile and MVP allowed the marketing team to improve time to market, enhanced customer-centricity from rapid feedback loops, and provide flexibility and adaptability that the marketing team didn’t have before.
OKRs were critical to turning the team from silo thinking to focusing on big picture objectives that drove the business forward beyond traditional KPIs and goals.
How to Build a Cross-Industry Marketing Culture
The most important part of building a cross-industry marketing culture is ignoring traditional hiring. Bring in someone with a customer service background for social media, have an engineer working with the lifecycle team, and consider putting designers or copywriters in UX and CX roles. Different perspectives drive innovation and shifting your team around, through cross-training and cross-promotion, can have more impact than a traditional hire.
Overcome fear. Your employees are afraid of failure. Afraid of losing a promotion or compensation increase. Afraid of losing a bonus. Overcome fears by structuring your goals, specifically OKRs, where there isn’t a fear of experimenting and having an experimentation mindset. Encouraging testing of cross-industry practices with no impact on their future will drive innovation across the marketing department.
Interdisciplinary strategies help marketers surpass competitors by redefining the competition itself. Explore synergies between B2B and DTC, find collaborative solutions between the IT department and marketing department, or borrow insights from parallel industries like shoes and eyeglasses and watch your marketing department blossom.