DMN3 Blog

You can learn a lot about developing marketing strategies from Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat. If you are to succeed in your marketing efforts, a systematic approach is important. Here’s one you can hang your hat on…

Marketing strategies are blueprints for your promotion and sales efforts. Alice in Wonderland teaches us that if you want to get somewhere or succeed, you need to know where that somewhere is or what success looks like.

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

A systematic approach to marketing strategy development will help you reach your marketing objectives more effectively. Here's an approach to marketing strategy development that will help you focus on the right things in the right order. The approach involves:

1. Defining the end point in concrete terms.
2. Creating your evaluation plan based on the end points(s).
3. Creating a hierarchical framework to achieve your end points.

Let’s examine what I mean in more detail.

Start With the End Point and Work Backwards: Simple as this may sound, you would be surprised how often the strategies become an end in themselves. As Alice in Wonderland teaches us, knowing where you want to get to determines the direction you go to get there. The alternative is to do a bunch of “marketing” and see where that gets you.

The end point(s) are the goals and objectives we want to achieve as a result of our efforts. Goals tend to be fuzzy while objectives are concrete statements. For example, a goal might be “to increase market share” while an objective might be to “to take advantage of the economic downturn to increase market share in a particular market segment by 10 percent over the next 12 months without an increase in the overall marketing budget.” The more we define the expected outcomes and the conditions under which they will be achieved, the easier it will be to select those strategies that have the highest chances to succeed, given the conditions imposed.

Go Right to Your Evaluation Scheme: Each objective should have a means to evaluate the progress you are making at achieving it. The analytics scheme you use should specifically measure how well you are achieving that objective over time. Each objective should have a measurement strategy.

This evaluation scheme should be determined prior to selecting any specific strategies to achieve the objectives. Measuring your progress as you go will help you make specific corrections to the marketing strategies as you undertake your marketing campaigns.

If you have carefully defined your specific objectives, the variables needing to be measured should become self-evident. Often you will find that the selection of the variable you measure will help you determine the appropriate strategies to achieve that stated objective.

Break the final objective down into “enabling objectives." You should develop a hierarchical approach to achieving your final objectives. What this means is determining both the specific level and sequence of steps necessary to reach each final or terminal objective.

If our terminal (final) objective is to increase website leads in a particular market segment by 10 percent over the next 12 months without an increase in the overall online marketing budget, then we need to determine what things will need to happen and in what order to get there.

For example, to increase leads by 10 percent may require:

• Increasing website visits by that particular market segment by 75%; and
• Increasing conversions by that particular market segment by 40%.

As we break up the “final” objective into sub objectives, it allows us to focus our efforts in a more targeted fashion. Each sub-objective should also have a measurement scheme to determine how successful we are in our efforts. We can take this a step further by breaking up these sub-objectives into bites as well. For instance, increasing website visits by that particular market segment might be enabled by increasing your ranking for “blah blah” search term used by this market segment to the top three search engine results for major search engines.        

Remember the idea is to break down our final objective into concrete steps that are defined and measured as we go.

Using this systematic approach to achieving your marketing objectives allows you to concentrate on what is most important to your success. Just remember: Objectives, Evaluation and Sequence.