What is a strategy? If we look at the first link of the search engine-Wikipedia-we get the following answer: “strategy is a general, non-detailed plan that covers a long period of time, a way to achieve a complex goal, in military affairs or later in any human activity.”In other words, it is a description of how to achieve a goal in action.
But is this true in business? Business tasks should always be digitized: carefully planned metrics will help you compare your results later. As a consequence, a business strategy is a set of methods and methods for achieving a set business goal with mandatory digitization of results: both in time and in the desired result.
Planning and evaluating a strategy consists of six key steps.
Bottom line: we identify the strengths and weaknesses of the company, as well as its competitors; at this stage, it is important for us to understand the location of the product.
Every strategy should start with an understanding of the product and its environment, and therefore with analysis and numbers. Yes, the process is quite time-consuming. But this will allow you to understand where you can work with the product, what to pay attention to, and how to make sure that the product is purchased/used.
For market analytics, you can order research from a specialized agency or start studying everything yourself. Moreover, you will have to learn a lot by carefully filtering the information you receive.
The best way to start is to analyze categories: this way you will understand what is happening in the market, which key players are present, and how they adapt to the current reality. Official statistical sources will help you do this: industrial research Statista, IQVIA, WordStat, and Yandex.
Next, we move on to identifying competitors. The biggest mistake at this stage is to treat market leaders like them. Keep in mind that their product may only partially or not compete with yours at all.
If we talk about competitors, there are three types. Let’s look at them on the example of cold remedies.
- Type 1 competition-products / services that are identical to yours. For example, xylometazoline sprays.
- Type 2 competition-products/services that are similar to your own, but do not match the composition or any other parameters. For example, not a spray, but drops with xylometazoline, or a spray with xylometazoline and depanthenol, or even the volume of these drops (your article is 10 ml, and competitors have 30 ml).
- Type 3 competition-products / services that differ from yours in two or more ways. For example, drops and sprays with sea water without xylometazoline.
It may happen that the leaders will be fighters of the 2nd and 3rd types. When you build a strategy, you focus especially on them, because you want to direct the consumer’s attention to your product. In practice, everything is different: you will spend a lot of effort that will not bring the desired result. The competitor switching factor is different for each type: for example, for Type 1 it will be 0.6, for type 2-0.35, for type 3-0.001.
After the analysis, we construct a competitive matrix. I prefer to use the competitiveness polygon, where I select key factors for comparison and then analyze the data.
We focus on the goal and determine the time to reach it.
After a thorough analysis of the market and competitors, you can start comparing your desired goals and opportunities.
Here, I recommend the “matryoshka principle”: we first describe the business goal, and then gradually reveal it until we eventually get a digitized result or media task.
- The business goal tells us about the growth of profit / sales.
- The marketing goal answers the question: “How do I achieve my business goal?”
- The communication goal helps you understand what should happen during or after communication with the consumer.
- The media task shows the result of communication with the consumer in the media.
For example: the business goal is to increase the market share by 10%. The marketing goal is to increase product knowledge by 15% and move away from the competition. The purpose of communication is to disclose the USP; the user must understand how the product will be useful. The goal of the media is to increase audience reach by 70% in 3 months, increase the loyalty of existing customers by 15% , and increase the number of purchases by 10%.
When developing a strategy, we often talk about the media task, that is, the effect of an advertising campaign. After selecting channels and calculating media plans, we compare the results with the business goal. This allows you to evaluate the approach not only from the point of view of digital marketing, but also from the point of view of the business as a whole.
Here, it is important that we understand your target audience: who is it, how does it use the product, and under what conditions?
At this stage, we look at the behavior and habits of the audience, their consumption of mass media. If necessary (for example, you are dealing with a complex product and its positioning differs for different target groups), we perform segmentation.
I really like the JTBD method. It can be used to determine the age of recipients, micro-moments of contact with the product, and product consumption.
Fulfillment work is one method of segmenting your audience by knowing their needs and how to meet them. In other words: the method answers the question under what circumstances the user is willing to “rent” the product for work.
For example, you actively control your weight: exercise three times a week and eat well. You work 8 hours a day, but you want to spend more time with your family and just don’t have enough resources to prepare a delicious and healthy meal for lunch on your own. A healthy food delivery service comes to your rescue, where the diet is already tailored to your needs, food is always fresh (delivery once a day at the time you specify). This means that you “rent” delivery of ready meals with proper nutrition or, for example, on the street +35, you are very thirsty, go to the store and buy water. In this case, you” rent ” water as a product.
After segmentation, we build a CJM. This will allow you to more accurately select the separated tools and build high-quality communication with your audience. Because you will already know how the user will behave in this situation.
It is important to identify methods and ways to achieve the best quality of communication with your audience using marketing tools.
Tactics are one of the most important parts of any strategy. We are talking here about how exactly the contact with the audience will be built: tools, creations, touch frequency, and so on.
Before you start developing a tactical approach, you need to build a funnel or choose a promotion structure. To build a high-quality funnel, pay attention to CJM. Usually the answer is already there. After all, the sales funnel is part of any CJM.
Describe the key problem / task that you will be solving at each stage of the funnel: correct the KPIs and select tools.
Today, customers are quite loyal to brands,so it is important to work with each stage of the funnel. At the “knowledge “stage, you need to declare the product; at the” interest “stage, you need to fix the” problem – solution ” associative string and work with reservations. At the “purchase” stage, involve your audience in the product.
After a detailed description of the funnel / structure, allocate the advertising budget and tools for each stage. Make rough calculations and make a plan. Try to digitize each of the tools in the context of “making a purchase”. Calculate the Romi. This indicator shows how profitable an investment in marketing is. The higher it is, the better. Romi should not be less than 100%. Otherwise, your investment in advertising will be ineffective.
We conduct an advertising campaign by evaluating the interim results and, if necessary, adjusting the strategy.
After you have prepared your content and determined the placement, launch your ad. At the same time, it is important to perform intermediate sections based on results in order to adjust the allocation over time and reallocate the budget from one tool to another. For example, you may have high hopes for attracting potential customers to Facebook*, but in the end, your channel that generates the most conversions is a Google campaign that is optimized for conversions.
After completing the ad campaign, create a report on its results. This will allow you to understand how much the strategy brings you closer to achieving your business goal. As you expand further, don’t forget to take into account the experience of launching previous marketing efforts.
Of course, you can do without a business strategy. But at the same time, be prepared for the fact that you will not have a complete understanding of the market, audience, stages of promotion, as well as an understanding of which tool is responsible for what. Which, as a result, will lead to the fact that marketing will not work as a complete tool. After all, you will not be able to compare the results and understand your position “before” and “after”.
We recommend that you use your business strategy as a tool before starting your promotion. Analyze the market, determine the position of the product on it (current and desired), consider audience segments, and then set business goals. If the process seems time-consuming and complex, you can always entrust it to professionals.
