Strategies, The word ‘strategy’ in this sense refers to the specific things that we will do to meet our objective. Do not confuse this with the broader meaning of strategy that the title of this book refers to. Your strategies are the plans that spell out how you will achieve your objectives. When goals are fairly broad, strategies must be much more focused. This is where we demonstrate what we are going to do and from this we create our action plans. Without strategies your work so far will have been for nothing. Going back to our sales goal we know that we need to increase sales. In itself that does not help us a lot. Our objectives have given us something specific that we need to achieve but we still do not fully understand what we need to do to achieve that. Our strategy needs to look at the key work streams we need to implement to achieve our 100,000 sales.
What we need to do at this stage is start to look at the levers we can pull to achieve the desired outcome. For this strategy the outcome is increased sales, so what levers can we pull to achieve this? Well, let’s break down the full sales funnel:
● Awareness: are consumers aware of us and our products?
● Consideration: do consumers find our brand and products appealing?
● Findable: can consumers find us if they want to?
● Informative: do consumers get the information they need from us to make a decision?
● Ease of use: is it easy for consumers to buy from us?
We should have a strong understanding of all of these factors from the research and insight work. Each of these areas has its own internal levers, for example:
- Awareness: above-the-line marketing spend, PR.
- Consideration: proposition, brand values.
- Findable: marketing activity
- Informative: content.
- Ease of use: user experience, customer service, conversion funnels.
These specific areas are direct contributors to the sales objective that we are trying to build our strategies for, but there are also indirect contributors. For example, customer service. Whilst providing great service to existing customers does not directly create sales it does create higher retention rates, greater repeat business, more cross-sell opportunity and word-of-mouth promotion. Each of these will directly result in increased sales and so the indirect levers are also vitally important to consider and can often be the difference between exceeding and missing objectives.
- From these areas we can now build strategies such as:
- increase display advertising across highly targeted sites (awareness);
- develop a market-leading digital proposition (consideration);
- make significant SEO improvements (findable);
- develop a content strategy (informative);
- improve our conversion rate (ease of use).
Each of these strategies will need a level of detail below it to dictate how it is delivered. These are called our action plans.
Action plans
Action plans clearly define the specific pieces of work that will be done within each of the above strategies. These must not be confused with the planning processes mentioned above, or the wider use of the word ‘plan’ in this chapter. Ultimately this is where your strategy will succeed or fail. Action plans are where your goals, objectives and strategies come together into the hard work. At this stage, more so than any other, the detail is crucial. Planning how the work will be done, ensuring nothing is missed, working with key stakeholders, checking the legal and regulatory frameworks are in place, ensuring budgets are planned and managed accurately, selecting and managing your agencies and many more factors will be crucial to success here.
We focus on these elements throughout, so rather than cover all of this here we instead look at tactical delivery of the strategy. In order to create the action plan we need to review what specific tactical actions we are going to take to meet the strategy. To bring this to life we can focus on one of the strategies above that are contributing to our ‘increase sales’ goal. Let’s look at ‘Make significant SEO improvements.
SEO can be broken down into three core areas:
- technical implementation,
- content and
- links.
When looking at how you build your action plan for this strategy you would need to consider all three areas:
● Technical implementation
- URL structure: is it optimized for the products we are looking to sell?
- Code: does it need cleaning, are there any errors such as broken links?
- Experience: is our site responsive? Will it be a great experience for all of our visitors?
● Content
- Topic: are we producing content that covers the key areas that consumers care about?
- Keyword: are we talking about the speci c terms that people are searching for?
- Social: is our content proving to be engaging socially?
- Fresh: is our content of the moment?
● Links
- Pro le: is our link pro le clean?
- Baiting: do we have an ethically sound link strategy such as link baiting rather than link buying
steps to an effective action plan
- Know your strategy.
- Understand the bigger picture – your goals.
- Be specific.
- Create a written plan.
- Create deadlines and milestones.
- Ensure it is measurable.
- Don’t compromise.
- Build in known factors.
- Be clear.
- Be thorough.
Controls
The above processes are very effective ways to ensure that you meet your overall business mission, but all of these are ineffective if they are not implemented and run correctly. I have seen many businesses that are excellent at this from top to bottom, but also some that are very good at the theory but fail to hit their action plans due to lack of clarity, poor communication or a fall down in the process. There are some clear disciplines and controls to have in place when building and delivering a plan that are crucial to success and they are no less important than any of the other parts of the planning process.
The most important of these controls is to implement a documented, management approach, assuming of course that you are not operating a real-time planning process (as mentioned above). This is where the Gantt chart comes in. Using a Gantt chart to clearly illustrate the progress of each of the action plans, and therefore the strategies, gives a clear reference point at any moment for how progress is being made towards meeting the objectives and therefore goals of the business. This covers the deadline and milestone elements of the strategies. Also, implementing reporting and measurement is vital to allow monthly, weekly or even daily progress reports against the objectives.
Reviews
Reviews are also crucial to success. A standard approach here is to implement a quarterly review, but this should be structured to fit with your strategy and business and so quarterly may not always be the appropriate time frame. These reviews should cover how each action plan is progressing against the milestones and whether targets are being met. From these reviews the strategies should be evolved. This could be the implementation of new action plans to replace failing ones, the restructure of strategies or teams or even the increase in targets due to unexpected success to date.
Risk management
Risk management is another important control. Your business and your industry will have its own risk positioning, which will be dependent on a number of factors such as. A full understanding of this dictates the plans that you produce and how you take action on them throughout their delivery. Constructing a risk matrix is a useful method of visualizing the risks that your strategies will encounter. You should familiarize yourself with the risk management techniques relevant to your company and industry.