By Juliette Aiken, CMO of Dotdigital
The current marketing landscape is chaotic, constantly flooded with new technologies and intense pressure for quick, cost-effective results. Consequently, strategy often takes a backseat. A recent report from The Marketing Centre found that 67% of SME marketing teams don’t have a marketing plan.
Yet marketing in the dark is not a permanent solution. Strategy is foundational for uniting and empowering marketing teams, while providing direction and stability. Without it, teams will struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes at speed.
What does strategy really mean?
At its core, strategy matches problems or challenges with resources and leverage. This will involve collecting and looking at data around the issue and identifying which resources are available to solve it, thereby helping businesses to achieve their goals.
Strategy is also a creative process, where thinking outside the box is key. It should be a forum that allows you to ask meaningful questions and investigate different solutions.
Having a strategy manifests itself in different ways and has varying benefits depending on your role in its formation and how you use it. Having a strategy in place should empower individuals at every level to navigate waypoints in planning and execution confidently and swiftly. It will also help them understand if their actions are counterproductive to the goals you set out and identify when correction is required.
Why do marketers struggle to prioritise strategy?
First of all, let me be clear that this is by no means a marketing problem alone. But marketers do often find themselves amidst an overwhelming amount of new technology, noisy stakeholders, and expectations that every month needs to be better than your last. All of which make strategy more important. Dotdigital’s global CMO report, for which 750 marketing leaders around the world were surveyed, found that all marketers use AI in some form, yet 33% view its implementation as a major challenge. This demonstrates that while marketers are embracing new technologies at each turn, baking them into workflows is still an area of concern.
Because of continued innovation and the rate of change in the MarTech world generally, it can be hard to keep up. This often means strategy is left by the wayside which perpetuates the problem at hand. Your ability to meaningfully adopt innovative technologies like AI forms a key part of the strategy equation. It’s essential that marketing leaders, as well as the rest of the team, treat strategy as a non-negotiable. But you need to make time for strategy; it won’t just happen in the background.
Another challenge is that ‘starting strategy’ can feel like a daunting endeavour. As with most things, the key is to just start somewhere, preferably as soon as possible. A prioritisation technique referred to as “eat the frog” suggests that we should start the day with our most challenging task as our productivity peaks in the AM. It promotes a deep work habit and deprioritises distractions.
Enhance strategy with team building
Team building activities are a great tool when you’re looking to develop your strategy. They help foster collaboration and build momentum within a team, enabling creative problem-solving. Team members will feel more comfortable to share new ideas, furthering their confidence to speak up in group conversations and calls (particularly virtually, where it is harder for some to speak up due to a lack of visual body language and cues to speak). From here on out, with solid foundation and trust across your marketing team, you can make strategy a group effort (don’t eat the frog alone!).
But don’t stop there. All strategy is vulnerable to biases and blind spots. Avoid strategy forming in an echo chamber and socialise your work across your organisation but also with your network. In-person and virtual events are great places to find inspiration and develop connections with marketers armed with new perspectives. Speaking to peers in adjacent industries can promote creative strategy formation too.
How leadership can influence behaviour
Ultimately, leaders need to be the real drivers of strategy. The rest of your marketing team will look to you for guidance and reassurance when it comes to strategic direction. So, it’s essential that as a marketing leader you a) put strategy on the agenda and b) are ready to champion it.
Besides incorporating strategy into your workflows, leaders need to ensure the strategy is memorable and repeatable. It should be easy to remember and easy to relay. It shouldn’t require an MBA to understand. While a strategy might be driven by those in a position of leadership, it should serve individuals up and down the organisation.
Ultimately, the rewards of good strategy are boundless and will be well worth the effort in both the short- and long-run. But prioritising its development is a major step that many businesses must take to reap the benefits.
