Planning your marketing strategy is key to success.
It’s so important to know what you’re going after and what you need to do to get there.
The idea of writing a strategy can be scary. But it doesn’t need to be — writing a marketing strategy for a startup/growing brand can actually be super simple.
The way I think about brand strategy is like this:
1. Fix your objectives
First, you need to work out what you’re trying to achieve. Take the time to plan and set objectives.
Find your North Star
Start at the company level. What’s the business trying to achieve?
Finding your North Star Metric can help here. A North Star Metric is one single measurement the whole business can get behind. It’s what would happen if your customers absolutely loved your product. How would they behave?
Airbnb's North Star Metric is number of nights booked. For Slack, it’s daily active users. For PayPal, it’s total payment volume.
Get the whole business together to define yours. It’s about more than just marketing, so it needs to ring true for the entire business.
Translate into WIBC
Next, think about what marketing needs to contribute to get you to your North Star.
Write yourself a Who Inspired Business Challenge (WIBC). This goes something like:
“Get gut-health-aware Brits who care about premium brands, who used to think there wasn’t a widely available kombucha brand for them, to trial Dave’s Booch.”
Now you need to focus in and quantify your WIBC to make it directional. Think about the context of your challenges and what you need to do to overcome them. Then, add numbers and context to it.
Dave’s Booch could have a new statement that says:
“Get 150 customers in local delicacies, who used to not buy kombucha from the store, to trial Dave’s Booch in the next 21 days.”
The impact? You know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, which means your to-do list can be hyper-focused on tasks that move the needle.
Work the funnel
Another way to help understand the challenge and inform your objectives is to focus on your funnel.
Use data to understand where the main holes are. Do people know about your brand and so aren’t buying it? Do they love it but still aren’t buying it? You’ll need a different approach depending on where your customers are falling off.
Getting this right is key — there’s no point throwing money at increasing your awareness if your problem is actually that your product is too expensive. If you’ve not got much cash, survey your customers to get the info. If you can afford it, work with Proquo AI to do a brand health check.
One thing to remember: you’ll get the quickest wins by converting customers further down the funnel.
2. Define your strategic pillars
At this point, a strategy means a choice. It’s a decision that helps you make further decisions.
Be strict with yourself. Keep working on your strategy until it feels useful. Will the statement help you make decisions? If not, it needs finessing.
It’s also important to note down which strategies you decide to eliminate and why. For example, one of your strategic pillars might be “focus social investment to optimise for reach” (if you wanted to grow awareness, say). That means you’ve chosen to eliminate other routes.
3. Work out tactics
Your tactics are what you’re going to do at a granular level to achieve your strategy (and so your overall objectives).
Wherever possible, make them SMART (check out the image for a refresher on how to set SMART targets).
It’s OK to have one of your tactics as “upskilling” so you can learn more before you proceed. And remember to keep track of any assumptions you’ve made as you set your targets.
By now, we should have filled out some of the framework. But we’ve only just scratched the surface so if you want to hear more, sign up to become a member to watch the full talk. And if you want to learn more about the North Star Metric I mentioned, check out Matt Lerner's talk from the archives.