A Simple Reason Why Marketing Strategies can go wrong
So you’ve designed your strategy; you’ve spent months on it, analysing the insights, running the workshops and finally polishing your powerpoint slides. You have, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful, and well thought out strategies, in the history of the business world.
Then it’s buy-in time, you run it through with the key stakeholders and decision makers and it starts to unravel. You go back and forth for weeks even months, you make compromise, the options become less and less.
So What’s gone wrong?
Well lots… but we will focus here on the main most common issue…
In simple terms you have engaged the key stakeholders and decision-makers too late and have communicated in the wrong way. These leaders have years of experience and insights, but most of all they have egos to manage.
By excluding these people from the early conversations around difficult decisions and harsh realities, you’ve missed not only quality strategic-thinking but potentially lost your biggest advocates! By only including them late on you’ve also ended up using a less-effective method of communication; you are now presenting to them rather than having an engaging conversation. And then to make matters worse, you are now delivering something to them that you think they want to hear so you can get it signed off – you are making assumptions!
We often see the same mistakes with agencies, which is why we changed our process from looking at the brief, to understanding the clients main challenges right from the start. We engage early on with clients, we try to educate often with hard truths that they don’t want to hear, but we then work with them (not preach to them) to find REAL BUSINESS STRATEGIC SOLUTIONS, that all be embraced within the company.
At Vault MCM we help you build your marketing plan and budgets, by focusing in on the key challenges faced by your business, rather than individual disciplines.
Not only does this make more commercial sense, it also makes the whole planning process simpler, more accurate and ensures that, throughout the program, we can ultimately measure performance in the right areas.
If you’d like more information about our planning process please feel free to get in touch.
