Marketing Strategy is Woefully Underrated
Most marketing departments I’ve worked at or with have been incredibly disorganized. Most of them have also worshipped at the altar of the Cult of Action.
The Cult of Action is the near-religion that perpetuates business and politics alike. It’s a view that decisive, thorough action is all that’s necessary to achieve success. Question this belief and you’ll be cast aside as a heretic. A negative ninny. Someone who doesn’t have enough faith in Action and therefore harmful to the groupthink dynamic.
Unfortunately, despite all of our best wishes, Action alone does not win the day. In fact, it rarely does.
The Cult of Action I describe above is a sort of self-lobotimization at the organizational level. Can a mindless zombie, no matter how motivated, achieve its goal? Well, yes, but only if the goal is eating brains.
What is a Marketing Strategy, Anyways?
During the past decade, it’s stunned me how little attention people pay to strategy. Even when lip service is paid to strategy, folks – even MBAs who should understand this stuff – will conflate tactics and strategy. Furthermore, they may not realize that a ‘strategy’ isn’t a ‘project list’ or a ‘goal list’ – it’s a simple course of action that involves utilizing an organization’s strengths to achieve leverage over a particular situation.
All a strategy is, is a set of actions that help overcome a specific problem or several problems. A tactic, on the other hand, is simply one of those actions. Tactics are important when executing your strategy but it is not the strategy in and of itself.
Good strategy requires a thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, the competitive landscape, the resources that the organization can count on, and opportunities and threats in the market.
Every strategy requires choice. The choice to apply your strengths to overcome your weaknesses in some way or another. If your strategy contains just empty platitudes and hasn’t pissed someone off at your company, then it isn’t likely to be a good strategy at all.
Furthermore, a good strategy is flexible and adaptable. It should be able to pivot to respond to new threats and challenges. It’s dynamic and requires ongoing adjustment.
Okay, How About The Digital Marketing Strategy?
A Marketing Strategy fundamentally works the same way a broader business strategy does. First, you start with an honest assessment of your current situation. A good strategy starts with accurately identifying the situation at hand. Do a SWOT analysis, study the competitive landscape, and look at your brand’s positioning, messaging, and past performance.
Then, decide on a ‘guiding policy’ – this a broad approach or set of principles that’ll guide you on your marketing approach. A guiding policy could be ‘To create compelling and memorable advertising campaigns that resonate with our target audience and drive brand awareness and sales.’
Once you’ve defined your guiding policy, you need to think about what coherent actions could you take to implement that policy. For the above example some of those actions could be:
Conduct market research to better understand the target audience and their needs, preferences, and behaviors.
Develop a clear brand message and positioning that resonates with the target audience.
Create visually striking and emotionally engaging advertising content that tells a story and connects with the target audience on a personal level.
Identifying the most effective advertising channels for reaching the target audience, such as social media, television, or print media.
Measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns using metrics such as reach, engagement, and conversion rates, and using this data to refine and improve future campaigns.
Once you do this exercise you’ll have the ‘kernel’ of your strategy defined and you’ll be able to iron out other portions of a strategy including resource allocation, your implementation plan, contingency plan, and north star metrics you’ll use for gauging success.
Digital Marketing Strategy Is Time-Consuming But Important
The analysis required to come up with a good strategy is time-consuming and can take weeks or even months. Unfortunately, many founders and startups don’t have the patience for it. They think they can just blindly move forward and meet your objectives just through sheer force of will.
That’s a recipe for disaster. While sometimes these startups will get lucky and grasp at flashes of brilliance what often happens is that they spin their wheels, burning money needlessly and wasting critical time.
Strategy provides the roadmap for success, marshaling the goals and resources of the organization toward achieving its goals. You’d be a fool to think that your business can find success without one.
The Marketing Ronin is a Master Digital Marketing Strategist
Part of my methodology is helping you understand the value of strategy as well as how you can implement it as part of your Marketing Ronin journey.
As an ‘agency of one’ your job will be to effectively communicate to your clients why you should be spending up to a month conducting research and laying down strategy instead of running advertisement.
One of the ways I’ve done this is by explaining that they’ll actually be able to save time, money, and avoid headaches down the road.
Put it to them this way: aren’t you tired of reacting to problems and putting out fires? Chances are that if they’re a client that doesn’t appreciate the point of a strategy exercise, they’re also the type of client who is running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying desperately to ‘take their business to the next level’ while trying to keep it afloat.
Remind them that it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right investment in thinking – rather than blind action – you can make the best use of the company’s resources and apply it to overcoming a problem. In the same way, as David defeated Goliath by applying the right amount of force to the right area, your client’s business can reach their dreams by ensuring they know where the most judicious application of force truly is.
If you’d like to know more about how to embrace your inner Marketing Ronin don’t hesitate to sign up to my newsletter below. When you sign up I’ll send over a one-pager with the overview of my methodology straight to your inbox.
