Maybe you don’t need marketing, maybe right now you need strategy.
Strategy penetrates through the fluff to the core, strategy is the root that forms the method, the message, and the movement that your business will create.
The method is how you’re going to deliver what you create.
The message is what connects you to who you’re serving through what you’ve created.
The movement is the showcase of your vision.
If these things aren’t clear, confusion enters.
Strategy work makes it matter. If you provide a service of any kind, how do you delight customers throughout every step of the process? Do they view your services as another “to do” or a valuable connection and wealth of knowledge that they have access to? If you sell a product, do people need it or do they want it? How do they feel when they use your product? What’s the outcome? Do you speak to that outcome in your message and movement?
Where does your target client go everyday that you can meet them there through non traditional channels? Is there a way that you can raise, create, eliminate, or reduce a part of your business model to create a game changing strategy within your industry?
How can you do things differently? There are so many components that form business strategy, and we love helping you look at them all — resulting in the creation or re-creation of your method, message and movement.
If you feel like you’re in a place where you’ve devoted a lot of marketing dollars to an agency but it doesn’t seem to be yielding results — it could be because your strategy isn’t fulled formed, or iterated continuously as you grow as an organization.
So how might you go about getting started in straightening out your strategy:
Look at who you currently serve through your offering — who are the recipients of your product or service on every level? Do you know them well enough to envision a day in their life? Write it down.
Look at the ecosystem that surrounds your customers — imagine every possible place that exists and write that down.
Understanding how you deliver what you create can be extremely helpful in journey map format — write out how a customer moves through the experience that you deliver and then compare this to a day in their lives and the ecosystem that surrounds them, do they feel understood (not trying to be captured) by your offerings?
After the baseline of who you serve and how is solidified — the business model can then be examined to see where additional opportunities, partnerships and revenue streams can be created. The Lean Canvas is an extremely helpful tool to map out your business on one page; business continuously shifts and we must keep going back to this and moving through the exercise of writing it out.
All of this information should then influence and form our content — this is where the method, message and movement should all converge if the strategy is clear. This is where the agency is then able to execute on a very clear marketing strategy.