Marketing and Strategy - Live Episode 6

Marketing Study Lab - Actionable Marketing Knowledge

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Topic: Marketing and Strategy

Discussion Points • The difference between strategy and tactics • Why strategy is so important? • How to develop and Marketing Strategy

Enjoy the Episode - Happy Marketing!

Website Thingy: www.marketingstudylab.co.uk The Professional Bit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petersumpton/ Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketingstudylab/ Tweet Tweet: https://twitter.com/cousinp81

Transcript (this transcript isn’t 100% accurate but provides a decent representation of the conversation – soz for any confusion)

Peter Sumpton Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of marketing. And with me Peter Sumpton, the Lego master of marketing, hence the little wavy Lego man as we started. I'm marketing consultant first and foremost. But I cover everything within the marketing genre. My mission in life is to help as many companies as many organisations as possible, see the value known understand the value of marketing, and then implement it so they can become a marketing focused and orientated company. If they don't, they will disappear in the long run, usually, because this gives them a short term view of the world and not a long term view of the world. And specifically, not a long term view of the world from a customer's point of view. So what are we talking about today? So what we're talking about today is marketing and strategy. That old strategy thing? What is it? Why is it different from tactics? What should we know about strategy that we don't? How can we formulate a strategy quite easy. Those are the things that we need to know. And we need to understand to become a better marketer, I always always talk about good marketer, bad marketer. And there's certain elements, certain components, or certain things that good marketers do, that bad marketers don't do. And this is one of them, understand the importance of a strategy and understand the difference from a strategy to a tactic. And that's hugely important in marketing, hugely important in any walk of life, but marketing more than any. So on that, if you've got any questions about marketing strategy failand, to me, put them in the comments. And I'll do my best to answer them throughout this live or after it if you're watching post live, or indeed, if you're listening to the podcast, of which this will formulate into part of the marketing study lab podcast series. So let's get on with this strategy thing. What is a strategy? And why should we utilise one? So a strategy is quite difficult to quantify. Everyone talks about being strategic, everyone talks about having a strategy a strategic direction. The way I like to define a strategy is it's how we're going to get somewhere how we're going to achieve something which is usually an objective, but it gives us an overall view as to how we are going to achieve a particular something. Now in marketing, that is usually to increase a competitive advantage, or improve some kind of return on investment, usually through sales or something monetary. Now, it doesn't have to be monetary. It doesn't have to be monetary, as long as there is some kind of objective that we can then work out the ROI and we can quantify it. So from that point of view, this could be signups downloads, event signups attendance, it doesn't have to necessarily be monetary. But at the end of the day, companies are really there to make money. So it's probably going to be some kind of financial element that is the end ROI. So that is kind of what a strategy is, it's how we are going to get to a designated place. How are we are going to provide a competitive advantage within our marketplace. And that is the strategic direction. Those are our strategic elements that we want to focus on. That all sounds really difficult and really tough and really hard to kind of work out and work out what we should be doing in terms of strategy. So what I want to do today is go through something we call toes, okay, loads of jokes, loads of gags, and I'm not going to go into the dad jokes of toes and pinkies and big toes and all that I'm pretty sure you can fill in the blanks on that one. But what I want to do is look at the toes analysis model, t, o w. s. Now, for those of you in marketing, you've probably heard of it before, you might have even used it. But if you swap the letters round and you look it up backwards, it's swapped. Now I think everybody in marketing knows what a SWOT analysis is. Everybody in business knows what a SWOT analysis is.

Peter Sumpton toes makes what important. So let's start. I'm going to share my screen in a minute. But let's start by looking at a SWOT and what a SWOT actually does. Because this is important, because this we can't get to the toes analysis without doing the SWOT first. So if I've got this right, here we go look at that, how magic is that? On the screen superb. Like I say, we need to start with a SWOT to get to our toes and get to our strategic direction. So this

Peter Sumpton a caveat here. To do

Peter Sumpton a good SWOT strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a business. We need to do our research, we need to use models and deep research and data and information to a certain extent. So that then we can understand internally, what our main strengths and weaknesses are, and externally, where our opportunities and where our threats going to come from. And I'm not here to talk about the different models and how we collect this data and understand it and what it all means. I'm here today to talk about the SWOT onwards, because the SWOT comes at the end of your marketing audit. It's a thing that compiles all your research and data and information, and shows you your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and threats, and says these are the most fundamental parts of your business of what's happening. Right

Peter Sumpton now.

Peter Sumpton What the toes does,

Peter Sumpton is take that on a step further and bridges the gap between your audit and your objectives and your strategic direction. In between that, we look to set objectives. But what I'm focusing on today is that part where you've got your audit nailed, you know, where your company stands, what it needs to do, and everything that's going on around it. So these what I'm going to show you today, I'll take you through the SWOT and then we're going to dive into the toes. So we'll do the swap that quickly. So say we've done our analysis, we've done our research, we understand where our company is right now. And what we've discovered is that these four elements, our makeup, our strengths are come to the letter and the number in a moment. So I'm not going to talk through all of them, let's just call them our strengths,

Peter Sumpton then we've got our weaknesses.

Peter Sumpton Again, I'm not going to talk through all of these, I want to dive into the SWOT more at the toes more sorry. We've got opportunities are external opportunities within the marketplace. And then also our threats, what's threatening threatening our business externally. So we're looking opportunities and threats to the external environment. Remember, strengths and weaknesses are internal. So great, we've done a little bit of a SWOT analysis, they're super fantastic. These are the main fundamentals that we need to know and understand about our business. Great. Now we know where we are. That doesn't help us move forward, though, as it is, this just gives us markers as to what is happening right now in our business. The reason that there is a letter and then a number attributed to each one is where the toes comes into it. If we don't let your number then we get slightly confused later on. So it's quite an easy letter, a numbering system. The strengths start with that. The weaknesses start with w the the opportunity start with Oh, and the threat start with T. And then all we do is we add a number 123456789, and so on and so forth until we run out of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats that we can talk about. There's no definitive number, it's best to keep it quite short. I'd say no more than 10 probably six, seven is your sweet spot.

Peter Sumpton But these are the

Peter Sumpton most important elements to our business right now. So we've done this, we've done our analysis, we've got our SWOT. Now what? Well, now what is the magic part? If the toes part and being the marketing geek that I am I this my favourite model? I absolutely love this model could talk about it all day long. Because I think it is that important, because to create a strategy. It really, really focuses you in on what you're good at or better, and what's happening in your marketplace.

Peter Sumpton Positive or negatively. So if

Peter Sumpton we just take a step back,

Peter Sumpton we've done our strengths and weaknesses. We've done our opportunities and threats in the marketplace. We know our current status. So I'm going to take these now. And we're going to look to formulate some kind of strategy. So don't see this as a cheat or a hack. I hate that word, or hack to creating a strategy because there's loads of research that goes into it. On a top level, you could probably create a simple SWOT and understand what strategic direction you need to go in personally, or a business needs to go and personally, but I think that data or information that research prior to that gives it more substance, and also more buy in if you're trying to get a board of directors, for example, on board with your strategic direction. So we've done our due diligence, we know what's going on now.

Peter Sumpton So what does

Peter Sumpton the toes allow us to do?

Peter Sumpton It allows us to take the internal aspects, and marry them up with the external aspects. And look at where we can create competitive advantages within our marketplace, a lot of fluffy words there. So let's dive into it. So what we do is we look at our strengths to maximise our opportunities. And we look at our strengths to minimise threats. So let's take the example we had and look at how the hell this might be done. So if we look at our strengths, we might go we got good distribution network that and we were looking to increase the others the opportunity to increase market share,

Peter Sumpton we could potentially use our distribution network to do that.

Peter Sumpton Also, we're great involved in the customer, we're great at co creating. And we understand that there's an untapped high end market, there's a huge opportunity to produce high end products, could be something that on the strengths and threat side. Again, we know we're good at co creating with our consumers. But there's a huge threat within our business because there's a skills gap within the market. So we're not getting the skills we require coming through in our business could be something

Peter Sumpton that

Peter Sumpton before we look at any strategic directions, let's do the same for that for the weaknesses against opportunities and threats. So what we do weaknesses seen as a negative, but if we can reduce these weaknesses, through looking at opportunities, they're no longer weaknesses, and then a double negative, the weaknesses to avoid threats, if we can reduce a weakness that avoids a threat, that is a really good strategy to have. That reduces that weakness within our business. It avoids a threat within the marketplace, which probably gives us a competitive advantage in some way, shape, or form. But let's talk me through. So weakness could be we've got no products that we upsell are currently

Peter Sumpton cross sell.

Peter Sumpton But we still understand that there's an opportunity to increase our market share, I'm pretty sure you could fill in the blanks there in terms of a strategic direction. Also, we've got a poorly implemented CRM. And as we know, in our marketplace, there's a huge opportunity for automation and a digital first approach. And then finally, if we flip it, and look at our weaknesses and our threats, we've got a poorly implemented CRM system, as we know. And the brand awareness is usually limited. So there could be something there to increase our brand awareness using our CRM, which we'll come on to in a minute. So this is how we start to compile or think about this

Peter Sumpton what

Peter Sumpton strategically to make it worth our while. So we're not just looking at what a strength what a weakness, what an opportunity or what a threat is.

Peter Sumpton And this is where we start to look

Peter Sumpton at strategies. So let's move on. So this is what we've just been talking about. those last two short slides that I showed you that had the arrows going to opportunities and threats from our strengths and weaknesses. On the screen that you can see now, if we get this right there are there apologies. On the screen. Now you can see, I've just put them together, the ones we spoke about. And that's all we've done here. It's important to note Now, if you've got any questions, drop them in the comments. And once I've shown you how to take these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and turn them into strategies, I'll happily answer those questions. I just can't see them at the moment. I'm going through this slide deck. Unfortunately, again, if you're listening to the podcast, you've got any questions about this episode, drop me an email, Peter at marketing study lab code at UK, hit me up on LinkedIn or any other social site that you can find me on back to the toes analysis. So this is where the actual magic happens. We showed the back end, this is where the magic happens. So we've got five we've got six links between what's going on internally in our company, and what's happening in the external wider environment. And what I'm going to show you is how you At the importance of first lettering and numbering them, and then how you change these into strategic directions. So remember, we're not looking for the tactics. We're not looking for actually how we're going to achieve this, how we're going to do this. We're just looking for our strategic direction, how we're going to do it, not the details. A good strategy should tell people how you're going to do it, but not exactly what is needed to do it. The best example I can give there is if you're going to take a car journey, you said, I'm going to arrive at certain destination at 6pm. For example, my strategy is I'm going to take my car

Peter Sumpton to get to to reach that objective.

Peter Sumpton So everybody knows you're going to be driving. That is your strategy. They don't know if there's any passengers. What roads you'll take the need to refuel. Are you going to take any snaps with you? Are you going to stop at any service stations? Are you going to take motorways? What speed you go going to be at? All those things? Those are the tactics.

Peter Sumpton Back to the SWOT analysis,

Peter Sumpton right. Okay, so we've got our strengths and opportunities. One strength was good distribution network network, and an opportunity was to increase market share. So what does that look like as a tactic? What does that look like as a strategy, what we could do is utilise existing distribution channels to increase the visibility of our products, ie next day delivery, great strategy, not quite sure what the tactics are going to be. Yeah, it's borderline because you could say a tactic is next day delivery. But we don't know who we're going to use for that. What the caveats in terms of time constraints are, what products and services we're talking about will be delivered next day,

Peter Sumpton those types of things, your tactics.

Peter Sumpton So let's just look at the other five very quickly.

Peter Sumpton We're excellent at co creating with customers. And we've got an untapped high end market. Why don't as a strategy, we focus on producing high quality products, or developing high quality products with a consumer or customer knowledge and information.

Peter Sumpton Because we're really good at co creating,

Peter Sumpton we know high end products are in demand.

Peter Sumpton So let's do that as a strategy.

Peter Sumpton What about

Peter Sumpton strengths are threats, though, so again, excellent at co creating with consumers, but there's a skill gap within the marketplace? Well, let's integrate co creation deeper into the company, invite our customers in, make them allow them to help us develop better products. In turn, we're reducing that skill gap that our competitors may still have. Because we're inviting our

Peter Sumpton customers to help us co create

Peter Sumpton weaknesses and opportunities.

Peter Sumpton Well, we know we've got no products, we can upsell or cross sell. And we're looking to increase our market share. So wouldn't the strategy make sense to focus on compatible products and services to complement the existing range, that's probably a product development strategy. Again, it could link with some other strategies that we've got going on on the board at the moment. Okay, last two. So we've got a poorly implemented CRM. And we know that automation or digital first approaches, becoming more prevalent as a huge opportunity to take advantage of them. So what's the strategic direction here or potential strategic direction, we could look to improve, improve our internal services, and create efficiencies and therefore improve our service. So if you take a step back, we've used digital, we've used it to help us improve our CRM system, and in turn, improve our services.

Peter Sumpton And finally, my favourite, the double negative,

Peter Sumpton the weaknesses and the threats. So we're saying we've got a poorly implemented CRM system here. We're also saying that our brand awareness is limited, it's looking pretty crummy out there. It's looking not good for us if we look at these two elements that our research has shown, so what can we do here? So what we can do is we can focus on reliable data, gaining reliable data, and then use that reliable data because we've improved our CRM using that reliable data to enhance the awareness of our brand within our existing marketplace. So don't let down a little bit. We're going to go through our CRM, CRM, clean it up. use that information on people that want to hear from us to generate more awareness in our brand. Now, how we do that the comms channels we utilise what we say in those comms channels, timings, all that kind of stuff.

Peter Sumpton Those are our tactics.

Peter Sumpton This is the strategy

Peter Sumpton and that is how you utilise the toes model to generate a strategic direction for your business.

Peter Sumpton Start with your SWOT.

Peter Sumpton If you want to go further back, start with your research. And then incorporate that into a SWOT Strengths, Weaknesses internally, opportunities and threats externally. Then you look at what's internal and what's external. And start to see where the combinations lie when you've seen those combinations, and it should be starting to become apparent to you, when you see those combinations, then you can start this toes analysis and start to think of, Okay, so we've got a pull CRM, and our brand awareness is poor. But if we date this data, we could probably communicate with the people that want to hear from us and increase our brand awareness as a strategic direction looking to increase brand awareness within our current marketplace.

Peter Sumpton And that is a strategic direction market penetration.

Peter Sumpton Okay, so that is how you utilise a SWOT but more importantly Atos to do your strategic thinking. Now, I know that's a lot to take in in 20 minutes. But listen back, if you need to rewind it, pause it. It's important we get this right, because there's a massive difference between strategy and tactics. And fundamentally, marketing is lacking strategic thinking. We're all focused on the tactics. We're all focused on the cons. We're all focused on the content creation. If we don't know our strategy, we don't know our objectives. How can we achieve good tactics to achieve those things? We don't? How can we get people on board? If we haven't got strategic direction? a bigger picture? A long term vision. Okay, so I think I can get off my soapbox. Now. I'm not quite sure. But maybe I can, maybe I can't. But seriously, if you're struggling with this, please reach out to me. I'd love Love, love to help you a little bit more, create these valuable strategies within our marketplace, make us all better marketers, and make marketing as an industry more aligned to our company's needs. And once that was a short one from me. I'm going to leave it there. And if you want to have a look at this presentation, drop me a comment. I'll happily send it to you. On my website, marketing study lab at the top, you'll see there's a link to a customer journey planning and also a market marketing plan. Step by step process of which this is part of. So utilise that, go on the website, download it, utilise it and let's make marketing I nearly said great again, I'm not going to go down that route. Let's allow ourselves to focus strategically when we think about marketing first and foremost. Anyway, that's enough for me, who provided some value into your lives. Happy marketing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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