Marketing is not a lone ranger; it goes hand and hand with sales, and both must have clear strategies and objectives to work. Most importantly they must be a natural extension of the business strategy.
Too often I see clients make decisions for their businesses based on a knee-jerk reaction “we need new packaging”, “we need a facebook page”, “we need a website” – all things they may well need, but run without proper strategic planning, end up being half-baked and with little return on their investment.
The trick to strategy is to remember that it’s not just about one element, but the entire business and how each of the elements complement each other and allow the overall business objectives to be reached. Strategy isn’t about creating tactical plans, timelines or even just goals. Right down to basics, business strategy is creating operational alignment. It means ensuring that all functions of your business are pointed in the same direction to achieve the desired outcome.
So how do you go about it? More often than not I find that clients – regardless of size (in fact some of my bigger clients lack the most strategic thinking), are running so hard to just keep up with the day to day demands of their businesses that they forget to consider why they’re doing what they’re doing. The concept of strategic planning is placed into the ‘too hard’ basket and the even more real & concerning “we’ll get around to it” territory.
Strategy isn’t scary. Nor is it rocket science. It’s actually quite basic. It requires some simple things:
- A clear understanding as to what your business purpose is – why are you here? What are you about? Why? What gap do you fill? How do you plan on meeting that?
- A perspective that is non-emotive. I wholeheartedly believe that passion is important to being successful in your business, however, there are times when removing your closeness to it will help you see things a bit more clearly. Inviting a third party into the planning stage is a smart thing to do. Allowing yourself to be challenged enables you to open up to the true potential and opportunity.
- Perspective goes hand-in-hand with accepting that things might need to be different than you’ve done it before. It’s more important today than ever to truly examine how things happen in your business – the market is tight, the opportunities are only available to the fittest and strongest companies willing to become more robust. For SME’s this can be the hardest part to accept, as we often are so close to our businesses and have done things a certain way for a long time and that’s a comfort zone hard to break out of.
- Answer simple questions – the functional, emotional, rational reasons why your brand / business can fill a customer need.
- Take it a layer at a time – start with the business objectives and what strategies you might undertake to reach them. Avoid just thinking in tactics, but employ an overall approach. Once you’ve worked through the approach, you can consider the tactics. An easy way to remember it is this: 1. Business objective, 2. business strategy, 3. sales strategy, 4. product strategy, 5. distribution strategy, 6. marketing communications strategy, 7. marketing tactics, 8. measurement
- Ensure that you have some way to measure the success of your strategies and continually inspect them. Strategies should evolve. I like to think of it as a journey from point A (start up) to point Z (exit strategy) via every letter in the alphabet. Rarely is it a straight line.
It might take some time and effort to make it happen, but the results you’ll reap as a result of the process will be far greater than without. I like the quote I once heard from a good colleague “it’s great that you’re on the bus, but you need to tell the driver where you’re going”.
For tips on how to analyse your business, check out our article on SWOT Analysis here.
Author: Jenene Freer
