Build a guiding strategy that will weather any storm
At Lotus Consulting we believe that building your marketing strategy is much like building a house.
It’s a process, where each step relies on the previous one being competently completed – try and build your roof before you’ve laid the slab or built the frame and its pretty obvious you’re going to run into difficulties.
Often, in the haste to be ‘doing’, businesses miss fundamental steps in the process of building their marketing strategy. They go straight to building out their promotions plan and forget that without a solid position, product and the necessary metrics to support that promotions plan, they’re likely to be throwing money down the toilet by the fist-full.
After years of explaining a best practice process to CEOs, we formulated The 3PM Principle™ to make that process even easier to understand. The 3PM Principle Benchmark Assessment Tool™ created off the back of the Principle also allows us to quickly and effectively assess when a business is currently at with their marketing strategy. You can assess your current situation by taking the assessment here.
So, what are the fundamental building blocks of a marketing strategy?
Position
The positioning you develop for your business is essentially like the foundation of a house. Any builder will tell you that if you insist on building without a solid foundation, at some point in time, all of your hard work will come crashing down around your ears.
Your foundation, aka your positioning strategy, is a summation of the audience you are targeting, the value you want your offering to be perceived as providing and the way that you will communicate that value proposition through your brand and key messaging.
Product
Your product or service offering is much like the frame of a house – the slab must be in place first and then everything after is built around the frame. In the same way you can’t build the frame and then pour the slab on top, you can’t develop your product or service offering and then try to find a market that might be interested to buy it.
The only way to create really compelling offerings, ones that people can’t help but purchase and share with others, is to really understand your ideal customer’s needs, wants and desires inside and out. Then, and only then, can you develop an offering that fulfils what they are looking for and becomes a ‘must-have’.
Metrics
When it comes to your marketing strategy, metrics are like the bricks of your house. They’re there to make everything feel safe, secure and solid. When you have metrics in place to measure how your marketing strategy is performing you know your investment in marketing isn’t going to disappear into an abyss.
Metrics allow you to quickly and easily see what’s working and what isn’t and make any necessary changes to avoid wasting resources. Being able to optimise your spend in this way leads to greater ROI, improved commercial outcomes and increased profitability across your entire marketing function.
Promotion
Your promotions plan is like the roof of a house. It’s usually the last stage in the process and requires everything else to have been done first. A promotions plan without a solid strategic position underpinning it, and no metrics in place to measure its performance, is like throwing money down the toilet. Your ROI will be negligible and the chances of your marketing strategy supporting revenue growth and improved profitability are close to zero.
If you feel like your current marketing activities equate to throwing money down the toilet take The 3PM Principle Assessment and find out where you’re really at with your strategic marketing plan.
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