Strategic marketing is how you’re going to use marketing to achieve your organisation’s strategic goals. It’s marketing’s overarching objectives. The ‘what’ we’re going to do and ‘why’, that guides the more detailed planning and execution, and the ‘how’ – the messages, audience segmentation, campaigns, activities and channels you are going to use to do it. It provides focus and direction and can be used for streamlining activities, providing priorities for time and money, and gaining a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges.
But where you may ask, does brand come into all of this?
Well, brand thinking, or rather the thinking you need to do to build a brand, provides an exceptionally effective lens to identify the real issues your marketing strategy will have to tackle. It grounds your marketing strategy in the reality of execution, after all, “If it isn’t communicated it doesn’t exist”.
So, to guide brand thinking here are four vital questions to ask yourself:
1. What do you want your marketing strategy to achieve?
Consider which of the following business outcomes your marketing strategy should be driving…
Deepening and asserting
You’re doing well but there is more that you can do to make a difference to people’s lives. Sometimes it’s ‘let’s do more of the same but better’, making incremental improvements, doubling down and pushing harder. Often you have all the low-hanging fruit and to move forward you’ll have to innovate and reinvent, e.g. Apple’s ‘Think different’, to become more relevant and to deepen relationships with stakeholders while building new ones.
Realising a new opportunity
Your strategy has a vision of expanding and moving into new areas and your marketing strategy has to step forward to make more of a difference. You’re looking at a fundamental shift of focus to respond to an opportunity for growth or to significant changes that threaten to leave you behind.
Breaking out
You feel your reputation is stagnant, but engagement is still sound and you want use your marketing strategy to lead in your area.
Defending
You’re in a highly volatile area and need to defend against the negative effects of shifting landscapes or face losing relevance, income and impact.
Future–proofing
You can see the writing on the wall of change. It hasn’t hit yet, or is just beginning to, and represents a massive change, and you want to pivot while you have time and strength.
Consolidating
Your portfolio of activities have created incoherence and confusion and you’re not getting the credit for what you do; people know the service but not who provides it, leading to lost opportunities. If things continue to grow unchecked there is a risk the charity’s brand will become more of a tangled mess.
Now it’s tempting to say you need to do two or three of these. And they do, on the edges, overlap. Be focussed, you have limited resources. Pick one for focus and, if necessary, a subsidiary: try to do everything and you’ll achieve nothing.
2. What is your market state and where do you sit?
This question helps set the broader context. What, in strategic marketing terms, do you need to do?
If your charity exists in a highly competitive sector, with high cause awareness and a high degree of cause importance for your audiences, then your challenge is differentiation.
If your cause awareness is high, but the competitive space is sparse, the opportunity is to own the sector.
If your cause awareness is low and the competition is also low, then the opportunity is to champion the sector and drive up the awareness and importance of your cause.
Finally, if your cause awareness is low, but the competition is high, then you need to weigh up the potential of a merger or find deep pockets.
3. What is your operating context?
This is a great bit of McKinsey’s based thinking that reveals the most crucial element you should focus on, i.e. what makes you special.
- What is the competition doing and what mental space are they trying to own? And how successful are they? There’s nothing wrong with taking a promising idea that isn’t being made the most of and making it work for you.
- What does your Consumer want and aspire to? What inspires and engages them?
- What has your Charity got or is developing? How is it different to the competition and what’s relevant and inspiring to the Consumer?
At the heart of this is your purpose and how valuable your charity is: “If you are taken away what will the difference be to the world around you?”. What is unique about you? Is it services, an approach, geographical coverage, or knowledge? Are they important and relevant to your audiences? If you have nothing that is important and unique, and some charities don’t, your strategy should be to merge.
4. Who should we aim for? Go for everyone, get no one.
This is essential. Brand, marketing and comms achieve your goals by inspiring people to act. Know who is important, who you must have, who you’d like to have and who just isn’t practical or important. Tough decisions!
A good way of sorting through this is to MAP audiences by their importance to making your goals happen, which you need, and who cares about what you do. Ask yourself is each:
- Measurable: effectively numbers, profile, traits…are they a ‘segment’
- Accessible: can you get to them with the skills and resources you have or can build?
- Profitable: will the time and money be worth it for the result?
If they don’t tick all these boxes, you need to rethink them or cross them off the list. You should end up with a list like this…
A-listers – they are both important and care. But are they engaging with you? It’s the low-hanging fruit, where you drive engagement.
VIPs – they are important to you but might not care about you or your cause. You need to focus on converting them.
People who care but just aren’t hyper important – they are the most difficult to come to grips with; in terms of influence, ability to act or amount they can give. They are however instrumental to your cause. They can be rallied as a voice, as amplifiers to motivate A-listers or help put you on the agendas of the VIPs.
Z listers – they are just that. They don’t care and aren’t important. They just do not warrant investment in time or money.
Since you’re in ‘the audience zone’, a good follow on exercise for each is to identify:
- What’s the one most important action I want them to take?
- What do they currently think about my (a) cause and (b) my charity?
- To inspire them to act, what do they need to think?
- What message do we need to send them?
These aren’t standalone exercises, they feed into each other and you’ll re-evaluate what you’ve done.
And once you’ve done them you’re ready to build a life-changing Marketing Strategy and execute this with a great brand and fabulous marketing and communications….and dive into all our CharityComms Guides (including Brand 360) on how to do this for bedtime reading!
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