Mention the word "strategy" to any business owner
or executive and there is often an immediate response of loathing. Strategy has
become a four letter word. One that is
reserved for big, multi-national corporations like GE or IBM. So, what have we done about this? Simple, substitute the word plan or planning
and all is good right? Not so much. The truth is that most businesses fail to
even have the most modest of plans or a planning document. Why?
Strategy is perceived as a long difficult process and if completed the
document is usually set on the proverbial shelf of our hard drives never to be
looked at again.
There is a solution!
Strategy can be simple, short and still effective if five easy steps are
followed. As always the process can be
as simple or detailed as need, but experience has shown that the more detailed
the plan the less likely it is to be followed and the more work it will be to
maintain.
Step 1: Know Your Brand
This step really has nothing to do with strategy execution, but has everything to do with strategic direction. Step one is to understand your brand. Understanding your brand means being able to articulate your brand in a few words or phrases. Think Mercedes or Apple. What comes to mind when you think of them? That's their brand. Knowing and understanding your brand and it's place in the market is key to developing your marketing strategy. If you're a start-up the strategy might simply be one of building brand recognition, but for an established business the strategy would be much different.
Step 2: Situation Assessment
Think of this as a "state of the union" for your
industry, the economy, and the marketing in your region or city. If you subscribe to any industry publications
or newsletters likely this has already been done for you. If that information is not accessible then
performing a quick SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
threats) would be a good exercise to perform to aid in developing the plan.
Step 3: Define and Develop Objectives
Objectives are nothing more than goals with a number
attached. Think both short and long term
goals. Short term should be no longer
than one year, while long term should be three to five year goals. When selecting objectives and the metrics to
measure them think in specific terms. An
objective of "Grow the business" is too vague to drive action whereas
"Grow average monthly revenue by 20%" is concrete and has a definite
number to attempt to achieve.
Step 4: Developing the Strategic Activities
If vision is the destination, then strategy is the plan to
get there. The essence of strategy is
making trade-offs. We can't do it all,
nor should we. Part of making trade-offs
is understanding your target audience.
If your target audience is soccer moms with iPhones then investing in a
mobile friendly website would be a key strategic activity. If you know your target audience then the
marketing plan and activities should be fairly straight forward. Hanging out where your audience is already
engaged is the primary focus for all marketing activities. Is the audience heavy social media users? If so, then Facebook might be the place to
spend time to cultivate those marketing relationships. The audience should heavily dictate when,
where and how the activities and marketing communications take place.
Step 5: Marketing Performance
The first step to monitoring marketing performance is to
develop a scorecard. Remember those
objectives and metrics that were developed in step one? Well, write them down and begin to track them
on a monthly basis. Look at the trends,
are they taking you toward the objective?
Fast enough? Do adjustments need to be made to your plan or
activities? Be careful not to modify the
objectives to fit the strategy or activities, but modify the activities first
to see if it moves you closer to the overall objectives.
There you go, five simple steps to developing a
strategy. Simple? Yes.
Easy? Not necessarily. Developing
a simple executable strategy can be done and it is so important to business
growth. Good luck and good planning for
the coming year.
Do you have a simple formula for developing your own
strategy? I'd love to hear it.
For a more detailed guide download the Guide to Developing a Strategy Framework
Mat Maynor
Mat is co-founder and chief strategy guy of Big Vision MediaGroup. He has nearly 20 of experience developing marketing strategies for companies
ranging from Fortune 50 to start-ups.
