How to present a marketing strategy
When presenting a marketing strategy you will need to be clear about the purpose and scope of what you hope to achieve. To that end there are six main areas to cover is any marketing strategy, they are:
Aims (Mission Statement, Goal)
Essentially this is what you want to achieve. You could have one or many aims but you are likely to have a primary aim to focus on. A statement is something that neatly sums up what your strategy hope to achieve, usually in one sentence. Clarity is very important at this stage, you must be able to clearly communicate exactly what it is you want to achieve as everything else in this document should work towards this ultimate goal!
Objectives
- An objective is the “how to” part of an aim or goal. This explains how you intend to achieve your aims. For example, if an aim is to increase brand awareness by increasing Facebook engagement by 10% per month in Q2 then some objectives might be to:
- Determine average rate of engagement for Q1, deliverable last week of March
- Determine required number of engagement events to meet requirements
- Design a Facebook campaign to target relevant users and encourage sustained engagement
- Monitor and adjust as required to ensure required engagement levels are met throughout Q2
Actions
- These are specific, detailed actions that will need to be performed to ensure objectives are completed. This gives a level of granularity that gives the whole team the clearest possible picture of each step that must be taken to enable a successful outcome.
Accountabilities
- At this point you might have a number of aim, a series of objective and quite a lot of actions in the mix. To avoid confusion, overlapping, miscommunication, etc., having a clear understanding of who is responsible for what is vitally important – and this becomes more and more important as teams get bigger and bigger. The responsibility assignment matrix, or RAM, commonly known as RACI, is useful for describing the participation of various roles and clarifying responsibilities when completing tasks:
- Responsible Accountable Consulted Inform
Resources
- Understanding the type and quantity of resources required to achieve the goals of any market strategy is of critical importance. An accurate picture of resources will enable you plan ahead and get what you need, when and where you need it. Resources can be anything from materials to people.
Budgets and forecasts
- Little of what we have discussed so far can be done without a budget. Accurately knowing how much finance you will need to see your strategy through to completion is often a difference between success or some degree of failure. You will need to understand how much you can allocate to each stage and what you hope to gain in return.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are more than just interested parties, they can be people, companies, or organisations that have legitimate interest in a “thing”… in this case your marketing strategy. Stakeholders need to be engaged from the very beginning, they are often required for advice, consultation, approval, etc. Knowing who your stakeholders may not be immediately obvious, you will need to be sure that you have identified them all and understand how and when you need to communicate with them.
Up Next
Next lesson we’ll talk about the significance of customer loyalty!