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The Secret to a Successful Marketing Strategy

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acres of farmland

The ambitious farmer, fresh out of agricultural college, wrote up a detailed plan for his farm.

He designated which crops he was going to grow, how he was going to rotate them, what equipment he would need, and how many farm hands he was going to hire.

After gathering all of his resources, he and his farm hands went out and planted acres of crops. It was laborious work, but when he looked out over his acres of fertile land, he was very proud.

Then he and his farm crew got into their shiny pickup trucks and drove away.

The young farmer took continuing education classes in pest control, irrigation, and hydroponics.

He went to some conferences.

He started writing an e-book about farming.

He and his farm hands finally returned to the fields the next year to find acres of weedy, rotting crops, half-eaten by wildlife. No corn. No potatoes. Nothing to harvest at all.

You will get no potatoes from your detailed marketing plan unless you have a system in place between January and December.

The secret to a successful marketing strategy is follow-through. Do it, measure it, adjust, and do it again.

Set Your 2015 Marketing Up For Success

Analytics and measurement – For tactics that support your key strategies, decide how you will measure success. This should be a number or a concrete result. Set up a spreadsheet and track the results from each tactic.

Did you send out a direct mail piece? Track how many people called the phone number or visited the special landing page. Did you create an infographic? How often was it shared? How many people downloaded it? Don’t include any activities in your marketing plan that can’t be measured in some way.

Decide in advance how often you will look at the numbers. Is it weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? Once you look at the numbers, be prepared to take action based on them.

After-action reports – At the end of every campaign, schedule time to review it. Not just the statistics and analytics, but also budget, resources, how the campaign resonated with customers. What could you have done better, more efficiently? Is it worth doing again? If it failed, why did it fail? Record this information and save it where you can refer back to it in the future (perhaps a Dropbox folder, shared with your team).

Budget updates – Hopefully you included budget projections with your plan. Those projections need to be tied to real-time numbers on a regular basis. The more you do this exercise, the smarter your estimates will be next year. You do have to spend money to make money, but you want to spend it intelligently. If you have your finger on the pulse of your budget routinely, you can reallocate funds if necessary. You will know whether you have the cash to invest in that sponsorship opportunity that pops up in April.

Focus your efforts – Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, you probably can’t move forward on five big marketing campaigns at once. When you’re writing your marketing plan, don’t assume that you’re going to do it all in January. In fact, you may not want to plan out your entire year up-front. Consider going quarter by quarter. Plan your first quarter’s efforts in detail, and then have possible campaigns outlined and ready to be slotted into the next quarter.

There’s a sweet spot between completely unplanned and rigidly scheduled…you want to go there. Give yourself the gift of flexibility, but don’t wait until the last minute to prepare the next quarter’s actions.

Accountability and reporting – Even in a solo entrepreneurship, you need to have accountability to the business. It’s not a waste of time to put your marketing plan down in writing, even if you’re the only one reading it. It’s not a waste of time to do a weekly review of your numbers and prepare a written summary. When your business grows, you will be happy to have records! In a small shop, grab that extra set of eyeballs for your campaign reviews and budgeting. It doesn’t have to be an all-day event, just make sure you’re not stuck inside your own head. It’s important to relate your marketing activities with the sales person, the customer service person, and the rest of the team. You’re all working toward the same corporate strategic goals anyway, right?

So while you’re preparing your 2015 marketing plan, don’t forget the systems. And we’ll be harvesting lots of potatoes next year!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: Ian Sane via Compfight cc

The Connection of Strategy to Tactics

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By James Ellis

In a previous post, I suggested that strategy was the achievement of our intended purpose in a given context. Strategies can’t be plans or just “smarter thinking” because that relies too much on a specific context. Context changes every second, so a plan that relies on it is doomed.

However, achieving an intention is a vague and perhaps even dubious sentence. It’s all well and good to say you’ll achieve an intention when you don’t have to say how. That’s where tactics come in.

The word “intention” is probably the most important because it allows you to align all your tactics to help you achieve that goal. Or, more interestingly, all your reports to determine the right tactics on their own.

We live in a world where you might have access to a digital specialist, a media specialist (a digital media specialist, maybe), a social specialist, a content specialist, an even specialist and a PR specialist. This world exists because each one of those ideas is a full-time gig requiring a lot of specialized knowledge. No one person can do it all. Not even you. So you need to lean on these experts to help you achieve your intention.

But you can’t just tell these specialists what to do. Remember, they know their jobs better than you know their jobs (that’s why you pay them). So you have to help them understand your intention (strategy) so they can build out tactics.

This feels scary. You are entrusting others to achieve execute strategy. But that’s the only way to achieve your success in the face of such a specialized world with so many interconnected moving pieces.

Why do this instead of just getting them all in a room so you can make a plan? When, aside from the sheer cost of that meeting, that plan will be almost impossible to implement. Remember, your own staff will constitute your context. Implementing a media plan will change the context and affect the plan. Even if you can lay all those moving pieces out, what are the odds that they all execute perfectly? What happens when your live event gets pre-empted or changed because of forces outside of your control? That might render your own plans worthless or even counter-productive.

Managing the strategy still gives you a higher-level view of the situation. You can see that things are shifting and relay information to the rest of the team.

You can’t rely on planning for every contingency because you will never anticipate them all. Instead, focus on your intent, relaying it to your staff, and let them make decisions. They are your experts. A plan locks players in place, without giving them the flexibility to deflect losses or take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. For example, when your social expert sees an opportunity to newsjack a story and build more buzz, You can’t have built a plan around that. And you’ll have to react quickly to take advantage of the opportunity, so bringing the full team together to change the plan around will be the same as throwing money away.

This is why building your team is crucial. Your job isn’t to do their job. Your job is to help them achieve your goal.

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is the Director of Digital Strategy at FLIRT Communications. His latest book, Google Analytics for Small Business is currently in beta. He’s giving away discounted copies if you are willing to help make it even better.

What is Strategy? Ask a Two-Year Old

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By James Ellis

I wish I didn’t know so many people, in places of influence and power, who didn’t know what strategy was. Too often, it is a word used in place of words like “plan” or “tactic.” Some people just use it as a placeholder for the idea that we shouldn’t make a decision instinctively, but to stand back and think about it for second.

This isn’t what strategy is. Strategy could be summarized as “the achievement of our intended purpose in a given context.” MBA words, all of them, but it’s actually pretty simple.

Strategies can’t be a plan, because a plan depends on the context (place, players, situation, your level of motivation, the motivation of your staff, your resources, the position of your competition, etc). All of these things shift at a moment’s notice, so a plan that depends on any of them is doomed if anything changes. Your “strategy” to enter the email service market went up in smoke when Google announced Gmail. The context changes, and so must your plans. Thus, a plan is not a strategy.

Strategies can’t be tied too closely to tactics, because those need to be selected closer to the moment of execution. Like a plan, too many things change. Your “strategy” to launch your product in Boston was great… until last week. Thus, a tactic is not a strategy.

Your strategy is the achievement of an intent. You want to be a challenger in a specific market. You want to be the number one player in that market in five years. That’s a mission or goal. How you achieve that goal is your strategy.

You want to see strategy in action? Watch a two-year old try and get a cookie off the counter. Watch them look at the field of battle, sizing up the height of the counter. Then they look for mom; how far away is she? Can she hear me? Is she distracted? They have a plan. Halfway through executing that plan, mom comes back in. Plan paused. The context has shifted. The plan won’t work. (At this point, how many companies would keep working on the plan, knowing full well it was doomed?)

A new tactic is demanded to achieve the goal. Crying? Maybe. Asking sweetly? Possible. Wait until the field is clear? That could take too long. Throw a toy to the ground and make a mess, causing a distraction? Yes. Boom. Cookie.

That’s the execution of a strategy. It evaluated many tactics, using the one that worked in that context. In a larger organization, where the selection and execution of tactics is selected by lower divisions, things only work when there’s a central strategy to align with.

I highly recommend The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay, the first book that looks properly at strategy as it originated in military thinking, and how it has evolved into how we make smart business decisions. (Don’t let the word “military in that sentence spook you: it’s a great read, even if everything you know about war strategy comes from watching the War Room scene in Dr. Strangelove).

So what’s your strategy? And where’s your cookie?

—

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is the Director of Digital Strategy at FLIRT Communications. His latest book, Google Analytics for Small Business is currently in beta. He’s giving away discounted copies if you are willing to help make it even better.

Do You Tune Your Goals to Get Maximum Opportunity Attraction?

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You Don’t Need Luck

My blog and my business changed when I wrote my blogging goal. Thing is I should have known that. Setting goals is one of those life lessons that I keep learning over again.

Sometime in college, I figured out that whenever I made a goal that was tuned tightly to who I am and what I do well, it easily became a catalytic action. Goals became my way of saying …

I don’t need luck, if I can make things happen.

What I realized was that goal set As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said …

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Every successful and outstanding business, every well-conceived campaign or action becomes an opportunity magnet with goals that are

  • clear, concrete, and intentional — What will you accomplish? Why will you be doing that? Who or what will help yo?
  • measurable — How will you know you got there? What will count as a good score?
  • reachable — The strategy can be to get to the stars, but the goal should be the next step. What will you do to get there next?
  • matched to your skill set Great goals make us stretch enough to be challenged an interested. What will will you need to learn or put in action to achieve this?
  • time dependent — Place a time frame on what you’ll be accomplishing. Goals need focus and urgency to keep momentum. What is the end date?

(skills x passion) + problem solving = opportunity magnet

For a goal to be an opportunity magnet, it’s got to have some actionable attraction. Great goals use what’s uniquely our own — the strength of skills, the leverage of our situation, and the momentum of our passion.

Do you tune your goals to get maximum opportunity attraction?

I make connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!

Great resources:
Effective Business Process Solutions To Achieve Business Goals
Make good on new goals this year
If I Were Launching a New Small Biz Web Site Today
True goals are SMART.

121: Help! I'm Lost — My Business Is Out of Control

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one2one blog post logo

Wandering through the Woods

I just got done reading Dawud’s answer to my question . . . What advice would you give to a friend whose audience wasn’t his niche market group? He laid out a set of six factors that the person might consider to refocus again.

At the end of his article, Dawud left me (and you) with a question.

So Liz, what would you suggest my friend do if they looked around and found themselves lost with their business?

Being lost is not a fun thing. I get that way on a regular basis, so I ought to know.

Whether we’re walking through the woods by the river in my old hometown, or navigating the issues of a business that seems out of control, getting lost is a real situation that we can only deny for so long. Walking in circles doesn’t get us anywhere.

If your friend is stuck, the first I would do is introduce myself and ask him to sit down. Then we’d take a moment to breathe.

I’d let him know that I’m on his side and that no one stays lost for long. He’d get a few minutes to tell me about his journey.

Only a few minutes. . . . no point in spending time talking about what isn’t working, at least not while we’re still lost.

If it’s possible, I get your friend out of his usual work environment. The best would be to get outside where there is sky and trees. Figuring out how to unbundle and unburden chaos is so much easier when we’re not surrounded by human-made things. As a second choice any neutral ground will do.

Then I’d ask, “Who are you What do you love doing? Who loves what you love to do?” My guess is that he’d probably try to tell me why he’s not doing it. I’m kind of relentless at times like that — I wouldn’t let him talk about how he got lost.

You can’t get “unlost” until you know where you are and where you want to go.

Some folks take longer than other folks, but we’d talk until I understood what his answers to those three questions are. All along the conversation, I’d keep checking to make sure that I was hearing what he said.

When we agreed that we both had a clear picture of who he is, what he loves doing, and who loves what he does, then we’d return to the state of his business now.

With the first part decided, the second part becomes easier. Hold up the business to day to see how it’s not doing what we’ve just defined. Then carve the path to bring reality back in line with the definition.

That’s how I’d start to help your friend who is lost.

Many paths lead out of the woods. How would you help a business friend who is lost?

And Dawud, I’ll leave you with this question for next week.

What do you do when your business is going well and close friend’s is not?

If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your answer too.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.

121: How Do You Use Social Media to Stay Customer Centered?

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one2one blog post logo

Customers Inside Everything

I just got done reading Dawud’s answer to my question . . . What do you want from your business when it grows up? Isn’t he the most amazing?

At the end of his article, Dawud left me (and you) with a question.

How can social media/blogging help businesses stay customer-centered?

You’ve probably noticed that Dawud has uncanny timing.

Here I sit alone in a room just outside of D.C. I’ve spent the past two days and will spend the next two thinking about products, marketing, and customers. I’m launching a new project soon. Questions like this one from Dawud are high and heavy on my mind.

How do I use Social Media to Stay Customer Centered? Not very well actually. But I know a few folks who do it really well. I’ve been watching and listening. Hopefully, I’m picking up a few things. . . . Here’s what I see.

Rodney Rumford commented on Robert Scoble’s video. Rodney’s customers are Facebook citizens. He’s listening to everything they say and responding.

Jeff posted a link about homerooms and social media. Jeff’s post prompted some feedback that added some insights to Jeff’s thoughts on the subject.

Over on Twitter, Chris Brogan asks questions and invites experts to call him.

Folks all over Facebook, LinkedIn, Pownce, and StumbleUpon are asking and answering questions on discussion boards and in personal messages.

You get the idea.

I suppose that there are vast customer groups for whom it would be less than useful to gather information from Social Media. Customers who don’t blog aren’t likely to be well-portrayed or accurately described by a medum on which they don’t participate, (as much as we might think they need to, if that’s our opinion.)

At this moment, I’m still learning. I’m a little shy about social events, even those that are only virtual ones. If you’re not, I’d appreciate any help you offer.

While I stand by the wine and cheese watching, I’ll leave you with this question.

What advice would you give to a friend whose audience wasn’t his niche market group?

If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your answer too.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.