Getting your marketing plans ready for action
The gap between thinking and doing is becoming quicksand for time-starved marketing leaders. Here’s how to bridge the gap.
If you’re in the marketing hot seat at any medium to large business today, you’re probably feeling the stretch from having to cover both ends of the field.
Not only do you have to ensure you’re crafting a marketing agenda that aligns with the board’s own business agenda, but you also need to nurture a team that can deliver executional excellence against an expanding range of marketing skills, technologies and data sets.
It's an ever-widening gulf between the strategic thinking needed to transform the business into a truly customer-centric organisation, and the agile (and often tech-savvy) responses needed to remain relevant and connected to the market. Add to the mix the renewed focus on tighter alignment between sales and marketing – particularly in those industries that respond to well-crafted Account Based Marketing approaches – and the pressure really starts to mount.
Time to bring in some ‘Focussed Planning’ expertise?
Whether your team is sufficiently resourced to execute against all your major channels, or you run a leaner department in collaboration with outsourced partners and specialist execution agencies, the missing piece is often the ‘Focussed Planning’ that draws directly from your marketing strategy.
It’s this instructional middleware that is often the difference between a well-executed growth campaign and a paint-by-numbers marketing calendar of tactics and events. Strategic execution is where a marketing leader gets to take their big ideas into market in a way that delivers measurable results, providing the ammunition to take back to the business when planning season rolls around and new budgets are allocated.
Working with a strategic marketing consultant to accelerate your planning.
Post-pandemic, the need for accelerated planning, built on agile models and tuned to the rapid shifts in the market is driving a new form of collaboration, where strategic thinkers inside the business are pairing up with peers (and perspectives) from outside, usually in the form of senior, independent consultants.
This ‘additive thinking’ approach is used to fast-track the ‘big picture’ thinking from strategic work into a number of more detailed workstreams, aimed at creating programs to drive results:
Strategic Planning Workshops: Disciplined, researched and facilitated to extract value from the organisation’s own knowledge base and promote a sense of ownership within your team.
Alignment Planning: Tying marketing strategies to campaign plans and ensuring the artefacts are clear briefs and instructions, designed to allow creative and campaign development that drives cut through.
Experience Mapping: Auditing and shaping the customer, sales, channel and employee experiences for your campaigns, to ensure your investments work in synergy across the various channels.
Planning Methodology: Developing and adapting proven frameworks for consistency and repeatability, paired with coaching for your team to stay coordinated.
Business Connection: Aligning business goals to marketing strategy and to campaign execution plans, ensuring the senior leadership have confidence in marketing’s ability to understand the challenges and deliver exceptional commercial results.
Vendor Engagement: Defining, managing and evaluating external vendor engagements to balance investments against capabilities, ensuring investment efficiencies while securing the outcomes you need to achieve.
Successful ‘Focussed Planning’ becomes easier with the right strategic consultant.
The old model of retaining strategy in-house and outsourcing the execution has become far too brittle to keep pace with the constant change of market disruption. A more nuanced, collaborative approach has created an opportunity for marketers to apply ‘additive thinking’ to their toolbox, by partnering with a trusted, experienced marketing consultant to produce focussed planning.
The key here is to find someone who not only thinks at your level but, crucially, has the time and the capacity to do it, and do it well. Someone who is able to advance your strategic plans and create the detailed instruction set that will elevate the work your team and executional partners put into market.
This is where the independence of a senior consultant really delivers value: unencumbered by large firms’ need to sell in downstream production or programs of work, they can ensure you have access to the broadest suite of execution options.
Talk to one of the leaders of ‘additive thinking’
Jarther Taylor is a marketer, an educator and an entrepreneur. It’s these three complementary perspectives which inform not only a comprehensive view of the marketing landscape but also your brand’s position within it.
If you’re looking to close the gap between your marketing strategy and in-market execution, consider a conversation with Jarther to see where the collaborative approach of additive thinking can take your organisation – and your career. Contact us.