Seems like an easy question to answer. Here is the twist you only get one reply. For businesses, especially start-ups, it is easy to think of all the wonderful things you want to accomplish for your business and how marketing will play a role. The thing is, there really is only one core objective you are shooting for and most likely it is something like driving more sales qualified leads or increasing sales/revenue.
When one of my mentors, Susan Silver, President of Argentum Strategy Group, first laid out this concept to me I had a hard time accepting it. I told her of course I wanted to drive more revenue, but I also needed to increase brand awareness. Her question to me was “why”? My answer was because if more people knew about us and our differentiation it would help drive more business.
Oh, now I get it.
The thing was, for me brand recognition was very crucial but it was not the main objective. Rather it was just a strategy to help achieve the main goal. Now increase brand awareness is fine to say by itself, but it is nothing without the tactics that help drive it, things like SEM, SEO, Display, Events, Social, etc. etc.
So often we find ourselves stuck at the tactical level that we lose focus on what the main objective is that we are trying to achieve – and even worse, we start getting into tactics that we think are strategies and those that don’t really help us on our path of achieving our objective.
It is possible that your objective will change over time and you will need to adjust strategies and tactics, but using this simple framework can help keep everything organized and will also help make your budgeting and staffing processes easier. If you start with your core objective and then chose the 3-4 strategies that are going to best help you achieve that goal you now can see the distribution to your main marketing areas and balance the resources and budget to help build each strategy. From each strategy you are going to have varying amounts of tactics to help support it. By creating this simple map first you have the outline that will drive all your marketing decisions for the coming year.
Your map is a living document that will see potential changes in strategies and tactics, but your core objective should not change unless there is a major change in the business. If you keep this map visible it will help you drive your marketing plan every day and will allow you to sort out what additional tasks marketing can or should take on – if they don’t help achieve the main objective you shouldn’t be doing them.
I know the concepts laid out aren’t earth shattering or new, but it is good to keep reminding yourself what it is you are pushing for and how it is you are getting there.
