A line, some slopes and three squares (Part 2)

Strategy

Strategy is really a great word. I hear it being used a lot in sports, “Well that team had a great strategy and played that other team off the park”, or in business when someone says, “Well we need a strategy for that”, without, in my opinion, a typical understanding of what a strategy fundamentally is.

In my way of making thing over simplistic Strategy to me means, “a mission for how you, or your team will go about achieving something”.

I’m a big believer in a strategy being “lean” but it also has to be “incredibly broad”. Something I’ll write now, to tease you for later in the post is, “let your tactics take care of the delivery, and your strategy the direction”.

So I want to take this part a little further. What does ‘lean’ and ‘incredibly broad” mean. Well for me lean, means that it’s something you spend a limited amount of time thinking about, once you’ve been directed, or have decided to build a strategy around what you want to achieve. Limited amount of time is really specific to you. For me it’d be a week. Incredibly broad, means don’t limit yourself into making your mission too short, or narrow, but be bold, with a long term vision of what you want to achieve.

I always think examples help, so I’m going to use a real life example to help guide you through this post.

Here’s the strategy for my project:

“In the following three years I want to establish my start-up program as one of the leading, relevant and engaging programs in Belgium”

So what’s your reaction to that?

I hope that it’s something along the lines of “But how are you going to achieve that?”.

Well for me that’s not what strategy alone is about. That’s where you have to move from your idea of what you want to achieve to how you’re going to achieve what you want. Or in my words, Tactics.

Tactics

Welcome to the tactics section. You made it! (I’m so happy)

So if you jump back to the picture (in part 1) and you see the tactics part you might now be thinking, “What the hell are those slopes, and what do they have to do with tactics”. (I really should stop guessing what you readers are thinking!). Well here’s the fundamental explanation of the slopes. The concept of tactics is fairly basic, for all business people in general. It can be summed up as an action, task, or process put in place to achieve the Strategy. Need some examples?

-         Run a social media advertising campaign to drive interest in start-up program

-         Create a marketing automation program for start-ups entering the program

-         Create some great goodies to give out at start-up conferences to excite start-ups about the program

Before moving forward, for the purpose of clarification as we bring this all together later on, I intentionally made three quite different tactics. The first one, running a campaign could be considered a one off, paid activity that would happen in a single instance. The second could be considered a long term process through which start-ups received an automated queue of emails as they progress through the program. And the final one, some goodies that are given out at a conference which you could consider either fundamental, one-off or just a way of driving buzz.

It's all irrelevant but as we’ll explore later, the way you align or consolidate tactics is important in how you will implement the line, slopes and three squares model.

Did I lose you a bit there?

Okay to recap, I was saying that tactics are an action, task or process to contribute towards achieving the Strategy. So now the cool part. How do they apply to the slopes?

Well if you’re a good marketer then you should know that when it comes to creating a tactic, that’s going to contribute towards achieving your strategy, that you do a great job of measuring it.

Let’s look at the slope again:

Did that image make you laugh? Ok I’m really sorry I should stop doing that…

But since I have our favourite business school image here of the product lifecycle, let me use it, as it’ll be familiar to you.

Let’s replace the revenue instead with the tactic or group of tactics you’re launching simultaneously. You launch your tactic(s) (remember we’re trying to get new start-ups to sign up to our program), you gradually increase the intensity of your tactic(s), if of course it’s working well, and then you get to a point at which the tactic(s) is optimised.

Now what?

This is when I use the downwards slope in the image. It’s doesn’t mean that you slow down, or stop with your optimised tactics, but this is an important time as a marketer to decide. Okay so what have those tactics achieved for me?

If you hadn’t thought of that before you put all your tactics in place, well now we’re getting to the best bit…

The Realisation Moment

It took me some time to come up with the naming for the boxes, but when it came to me, boy was I happy.

So let’s continue the pace of where we left off. “Realisation Moment”. Does that mean something to you after my previous question… (What have those tactics achieved for me?)

Now a realisation moment, in relation to Marketing Strategy, is a moment in time when you can confirm either the success or failure of your tactics towards the achievement of your strategy. Why call it a realisation moment?

A realisation moment is a moment in time when you can confirm either the success or failure of your tactics towards the achievement of your strategy

Because it’s a single point in time when you stop, look back at what you’ve done, decide quickly on how to proceed and move on.

For me this is critically important and something I’ve seen many people miss, and in the worst cases seen people running a tactic for years upon years without stopping and saying, “hold on a moment, is this actually working?”

A realisation moment can be defined up front, “Let’s see what our results are on December 12th and decide how we move forward from there” or it could even be something like an event “let’s have an expert come and talk to start-ups and if we have more than 50 attendees then we know we’re beginning to turn the tide and excite people around the work we’re doing”.

Because marketing tactics can be so broad it’s really up to you about how you choose to define the realisation moment, but in my opinion it is by far and away one of the most important things to make sure you’re achieving your strategy, but also to keep the team motivated that all that hard work and tactics that were put in place either did, or didn’t achieve what you wanted it to.

 Ok we’ve covered the three things this post was titled. So now you might be thinking this should have been called, Strategy, Tactics and a Realisation moment, but would you have really read it if it said that?

Tomorrow in Part 3, we'll bring this all together and I'll give you some pointers on how to implement this model.