Strategy versus action - the marketing dichotomy.

We've supported many different organisations and companies over the years, troubleshooting poor performance, building marketing functions from the ground up, and supporting the recruitment new team members and heads of department.

This all means that we've seen a lot of marketing plans, team CV’s and PowerPoint presentations. We're usually brought in when something isn’t working and our first task is to try and work out why.

What we find, nearly always, is that marketing teams fail when they fall into two, diametrically opposed camps. One is the strategy kings (or queens). You want to see a marketing plan - they’ve got a 32 page powerpoint for that. You want to see the messaging matrix - they’ve got a powerpoint for that. You want to see their segmentation…..you get the picture. And then you ask for their marketing reporting on completed campaigns, complete with content/creative etc……and crickets…………..

You see they’ve spent so much time doing research, building (beautiful!) decks, researching funnels and so on that they’ve not actually CREATED anything. No outputs, nothing, zilch……..

And the second camp are the opposite - TONS of activity, blogs every week or so (so much so that whilst brilliant for SEO their website is actually IMPOSSIBLE to navigate), events left right and centre, social media posts coming out of their eyeballs. But if you ask them what their product is, who they are selling to, and where the pain points are……tumbleweed.

So all that activity is completely missing their audience. It’s not building brand equity, or leading people down a sales pathway because it’s fragmented and trumpeting a different product every week. Nobody has a clue who they are, and what they stand for. So what’s the answer?

What we strive for the middle ground. We aim to get businesses to a point where they can define their proposition, they understand who they are selling to, and why those people buy. If we’ve done it really well we’ll also understand who the competitors are and what the blockers to sale are. And then we’ll have OUTPUTS. There will be a clear content strategy being delivered - with anchor content pieces that blogs, infographics, videos and PowerPoint decks can hang from - with consistent messaging focused around key themes that resonate with their audiences. There will be events - but they will be targeted and there will be a plan in place for warming up the attendees, and following up. And there will be targeted advertising - but it will start low value until we can work out what works.

It’s clear you need the strategy upfront. But if you spend so much time coming up with the plan, getting sign off, socialising with the business etc, that you never get to a delivery point, something is very wrong. And likewise, if you can see tons of activity from your team, but it’s not actually generating anything, then you need to ask for the strategy and segmentation.

Getting the balance right is a tricky one - but all strategy and no output gets you nowhere, whilst tons of activity without a strategy is almost as dangerous.

If you want a hand getting to the bottom of an underperforming marketing function, whether that’s people, outputs or strategy, or you need to start from scratch and don’t know how to begin - get in touch.