Why your marketing strategy IS rocket science (sort of)

I start our guided strategy and planning sessions by asking businesses what their aspirations are in the near future. I've done a lot of these over the past few years and the responses are interesting. Often there is some uncomfortable shuffling in chairs or all heads turn towards 'the boss'. Then there's the standard ‘make a profit’, which, for most businesses, should probably taken as read.

After asking a round of ‘whys’, we start to get to the real objectives that more often than not require a profit to achieve.

'Ok, what are your Apollo statements?’

Understandably, this is often met with blank expressions at which point I explain.

In 1962, President Kennedy made a speech in which he said,

"...this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

In fewer than 30 words, Kennedy communicated to the entire nation what their focus was going to be. It had a clear statement of an ideal future, a timeline and a measurable outcome — send someone to the moon, make sure they come back and do so on, or before, 31 December 1969.

The result was the Apollo space program.

There's no nitty gritty in Kennedy's words of how they'd need to arrange a rocket, create new materials that didn't exist or sort out the catering. Those are goals that fell out of the strategy.

Sometimes I hear the penny drop as the realisation dawns that if you can't express what you are trying to achieve in simple terms to your people, then how can you expect them to form their own goals to hit a common objective?

Later in our planning sessions after looking at another four strategic areas, we arrive at planning the marketing. And the first question is, ‘What are your marketing goals?’

By this time, participants are getting wise to my analogies and they confidently start creating the smaller steps that are required to take them to their overarching strategy:

Well, if we want to get to Z within 18 month's time, we'll need x conversions and to get them we need x enquiries, so our first goal is to generate x enquiries from our target audience within the next 10 months. So, we'll need to run a campaign starting in 3 months, etc.

And they are off....a few weeks later they have a strategy, plan and timeline on a handful of pages. And anyone in the organisation can pick it up and understand it.

My aim in this is to help businesses to create their own marketing plans, but feedback has told me that thinking about this simple question has been super valuable to the business as a whole. In one instance, a client totally changed their product offering and direction based upon this process, because what they were doing wouldn't lead to a satisfaction of their ‘Apollo’ objectives.

As I tell my customers, it's not rocket science. But it sort of is.