A line, some slopes and three squares (Part 3)

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?

 So here’s the original image. Notice anything I haven’t covered?

Well for the really observant ones (I’m hoping that’s all of you), you’ll see that there are more than one slope and three boxes. So what does that mean.

Well this links back to what I said in the strategy section. Your strategy should be “lean” but “incredibly broad”.

With our understanding of the three sections let’s start to bring them all together.

I was once told by a very valued mentor, that success in business is all about how well you can move between high level strategy and being deep in the tactics. This is important, as mentioned in the strategy section “people misunderstand what strategy is”. If you’re told “make me a strategy for sending out emails to people,” then sorry, but you don’t have something that will work in this model. If you have however, “build me a strategy for how we as a business will contact people by email”, then you have something to go with.

"Success in business is all about how well you can move between high level strategy and being deep in the tactics"

Let's Close

So you’ve built you Strategy mission statement. Something like.

“Transform the way we contact our customers, through digital channels”

You’ve also built some tactics that fit well to the slope.

-         Build and test email templates with customers

-         Drive email newsletter registrations through online advertising

And you’ve thought about your realisation moment.

By July 29th we’ll have signed up 500 new registrations and decided upon the template that we’ll use.

Well Done!

But you’ve only just started. Your Strategy is a long term, but lean approach to how you will achieve something.

What if your manager says after your first realisation moment, “ok, great job, but we now need to focus on social media as email is old hat” (I guess I’m the only one who’d say something like that…)

Well then you can congratulate yourself again in the fact that you made your mission within your strategy, incredibly broad. We said, transform the way we contact our customers through digital channels, not email… So all the work you did towards achieving your strategy through the work you did in email is not, lost, or irrelevant, but it is your foundation through which you can then build even better and stronger tactics upon. You have time after the realisation moment to reconsider your tactics, realign and then launch again back in the market.

The key piece to your success is that your strategy, tactics and realisation moment are always aligned. If you’re creating a tactic that doesn’t lead you to your realisation moment, then drop it. If you’re launching a tactic that has nothing to do with your strategy, then scrap it. All three parts of the model have to work side-by-side and in harmony for you to succeed in achieving the strategy you set out on in the first place.

Thanks for reading through this 3 part post. I wrote this two years ago but had never posted it, but people kept coming to me asking for advice on how to build a strong Marketing Strategy and I ended up defaulting to this explanation. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas, and whether you've used something like this before to achieve your organisation goals.