Beginning your strategy

How do you write a marketing strategy?

Like, really, when it comes down to it, pen to paper, what do you do?

Most marketers don’t start from level 0 when creating marketing strategy. There is no blank sheet of paper, no empty word doc, maybe a clean whiteboard if you’re lucky… but definitely not without an existing plan behind it. For most of us, we either take over an existing strategy or work to continually develop our own.

But most strategy advice treats you as if you are building it from the bottom up. In reality, our changes are rarely that dramatic.

So what gives?

From inside the jar, it’s hard to read the label. We often get distracted by what we can already see and, fundamentally, it can really harm your marketing plan. It’s easier to explain how to build a strategy if you’re working from the assumption of nothing. Instead, building strategy is a much more nuanced process. Yes there’s things you will need to change (if there wasn’t then you could be taking that much-needed vacation you’ve been thinking about), but there will be a lot you will want to keep too. Taking the time to really look at what you have, what’s working for you, and what isn’t, is such a key step and is so often overlooked. Change doesn’t have to be dramatic, it just needs to be meaningful.

The real question has therefore got to be: how do you build a strategy from what you’ve already got?

This podcast is a little different for us. Garrett Mehrguth sits down with Lucy Hitz and together they dissect a real-life brand strategy (an exercise we as marketers need to do more) in real time. They take a brand they have little experience with, enter in as a consumer would, but pick it apart in a way that only marketers can. Together, they run through the brand website and figure out its guts, its strategy, and what they would do to improve it.

It’s not advice, per say — you won’t find tips or tricks here. The real value in this podcast is a look into the room where the work happens. If you’re lost looking at what you already have, this podcast is a great avenue to learn how to look at your company, look at where it’s at, and look at where you can take it.