Today’s fast-paced, give-it-to-me-now, speed-of-thought business climate pushes us to be both brilliant and fast. Speed wins and brilliant speed dominates. That’s certainly the case for marketing professionals. These times call for us to solve marketing problems faster than we ever have before. Often to the point of recognizing a problem, defining a strategy, executing on an idea and seeing the results all in a single day. Heck, in a single hour. It’s fly-by-the-seat-your-pants marketing at its very best. And its very worst.
That sort of business and marketing climate often leads us marketers — and we’re all guilty of it from time to time — to skip past vital steps in order to solve problems and get to market quicker. The most common mistake we see in this accelerated business culture is jumping straight to tactics and execution without considering strategy. It’s do first, think later, and it leads to misguided marketing and missed opportunities.
Here are the three steps we should all go through when working on any particular marketing problem. Nothing new, of course, but it’s amazing how often we spend little or no time on the first two steps.
1. Define the problem.
The most common mistake marketers make is trying to solve the wrong problem. They try to generate leads when what they really need is better sales support. Or they try to maintain their market share by finding new business when what they really need to do is increase customer retention. Define the real problem and you’re well on your way.2. Determine a strategic approach.
There are usually a number of approaches to solving a marketing problem. Need more retail foot traffic? You could have a sale, redecorate the interior to make it more customer-friendly, move to a new location, change up your product mix, expand your advertising reach, etc.3. Execute on the strategy.
Once you’re set on a strategy, it’s time to determine tactics and then set to executing your ad campaign, referral program, direct marketing blast or new Web portal.Why is strategy so important? Take a moment to consider a scenario where you were forced to choose between a brilliant strategy executed in a lackluster way or a lackluster strategy executed beautifully. If you were forced to choose with your eyes, as most of us are prone to do, your initial reaction would be to choose the clever, creative, beautiful execution of a poor idea rather than the opposite. But a brilliant strategy with lackluster execution has at least some chance of moving the needle — you might only get 30% of what you’d get with great strategy and great execution, but an off-target strategy featuring award-winning writing and design won’t fare nearly as well. Great strategy will always win the day.
And you’ll actually solve the problem faster and more efficiently too. Speed wins.