Strategy first, then tactics

It no longer surprises me to hear business owners say they don’t really have a well-documented business strategy. Most of them know it’s a job they need to get done… they just haven’t devoted much time to it because they’re too busy working in the business.

My work with 24 Hour Marketing Plan and 24 Hour Business Plan is motivated by the need for this job-to-be-done in the market. We help business leaders and boards work on the business, designing strategies for the next one, two and three years of business growth.

Strategy gives structure to ambition

While business leaders are often rewarded for agile, decisive decision-making, (ideally the right decisions), tactical decisions without an informed strategy can fall short.  

Saying you want to build a billion-dollar company in the next three years is a lofty ambition, but it’s just a pipe dream if you don’t carefully plan what you need to do to get even close to achieving it. 

So think about what you need to do at the whole-of-business level first, then turn your mind to the operational strategy for your marketing. [Read my earlier post “Without Marketing is your Business Model Strategic?”] 

A good strategy will consider the ‘why’ of your market – actually, it’ll also cover a whole lot of ‘whats’ – and I’ve found a helpful model for planning marketing strategy is Alexander Chernev’s Market Value Map. 

The Market Value Map helps you plan strategies for:  

1. Fulfilling the needs of your target market (your customers’ jobs-to-be-done) 

2. Improving your market offering, and  

3. Creating a strong value proposition for customers, collaborators and the company. 

Within the target market section of the map are 5Cs to focus on to help you gain a better understanding of your market. I’ll cover those 5Cs in more detail in a future article, though for now, here’s a summary: 

1. Customers – what are your customers’ needs that your business can fulfill? 

2. Collaborators – what other entities can work with your business to help fulfill your customers’ needs? Collaborators can be suppliers, distribution partners, innovation partners (like academia) or strategic partners (like me!)

3. Company – what are the resources (capabilities and capacities) within the business that will help you fulfill your customers’ needs? (The building blocks for this are inside Strategyzer’s business model canvas, which I outlined in my earlier article on updating your business strategy with a strong marketing focus.)  

4. Competitors – what other offerings are in the market that are competing for your customers’ attention and money? 

5. Context – what are the big trends in your market – political, economic, sociocultural, technological and environmental – that could affect your business and its competitiveness? 

When we’re working with businesses on their strategies in the 24 Hour Marketing Plan and 24 Hour Business Plan we devote a reasonable amount of time to all 5Cs, especially the market context.  

That’s because most businesses don’t operate a monopoly in a closed system. So you need to know what and who you’re up against. Then we design a marketing strategy to drive your success for the long-term. 

Marketing channel strategies

Marketers rightly consider an array of channels when creating a strategy. But sometimes they get caught up in wanting to use the latest shiny thing, like an analytics tool or new interactive content format. And they end up going off strategy.  

Sure, a webinar or a TV ad campaign might be a useful way to engage some segments of your target market.  

Though a series of tactics for using channels isn’t enough: you need to think more holistically about where you can best engage each of your customer segments within the time, budget and resource constraints of your marketing team. 

Time and budget constraints are actually useful guardrails: they encourage you to plan your strategy – and execution (tactics) – more carefully.  

I’ve recently worked with a few clients who needed help getting back their marketing strategies back on track after one too many vainglorious attempts to make channel tactics work. Some of the tactics they’d tried weren’t individually terrible, but their efforts weren’t coordinated. 

There’s an interesting article in Harvard Business Review about “Why good leaders make bad decisions”, which explains the psychology of leaders wanting so badly to make favoured tactics work that they miss all the warning signs about their judgment being off.  

I’m not saying you shouldn’t fuck around and find out whether the latest shiny thing might deliver on its hype. I’m all for experimenting and having some level of flexibility as you try different tactics. But really try to keep within your time and budget constraints, because marketing shouldn’t be seen as a gamble. It should be strategic.  

If you want a marketing strategy that drives success for the long-term, contact us.