Kick off marketing strategy development with a workshop to develop the most effective strategy and achieve business growth
Reader Note: This blog is the second installment in our Developing Strategic Marketing Plans series. You preceding blog: The Value of Starting with Strategy here.
You can read the final installment: Turning Strategy into action here
You know why your products are the best solutions for your customer’s needs, but do you know the right benefit message to convey, the best time to relay it, and the medium that will most effectively drive each of your marketing segments to take the desired action? Prioritize hosting a marketing workshop to pinpoint these answers.
Top brands – even those with deep marketing departments – continuously seek outside partners to facilitate strategy development, beginning with a marketing workshop, because they want an outside perspective. An outside partner like a marketing agency can look at your challenges differently, force the discussion of uncomfortable topics, provide a unique perspective and offer competitive insights. As a neutral third party, they can act as a moderator who can offer objective feedback regarding challenges, messaging, and ideation throughout strategy development process.
A marketing workshop is a detailed briefing and work session between the agency and key organizational stakeholders, designed to elevate a variety of voices, paint the full picture of the organization’s challenges, and then determine which can best be addressed through marketing strategy. Attendees typically include product managers, marketing heads, customer service leads, along with integrated agency leads.
There are two parts to an effective marketing workshop, a debriefing session and a work session. Rhea + Kaiser often conducts two-day workshops that allow for a full day to be dedicated to a briefing. This portion of the workshop is all about uncovering critical details of your brand, industry, and products to obtain a 360-degree view of your organizational goals and challenges.
PART 1: AGENCY BRIEFING TOPICS THAT SUPPORT STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
- Business goals and key metrics (KPIs): Providing agency partners with an understanding of the business goals and how the individual stakeholders are evaluated, will help establish the foundation in developing a marketing program with the proper performance tracking metrics.
- Brand and product information: Product information is key to understanding the solutions you provide your customers and customer insights into why they select your brand. This will help identify the emotional connection that motivates prospects and customers to seek your products or think of your brand first.
- Market and competitive briefing: What is your market share? How are your competitors maintaining or growing theirs? These are questions every organization should answer to assess the future landscape of their business. A SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can be helpful in facilitating these discussions during the workshop, with input from your key stakeholders and a fresh outside perspective.
- Marketing challenges: Understanding your business and communication challenges through the perspective of your department leads will help uncover all the hurdles to achieving your marketing goals, as well as opportunities you might have not realized you had.
- Audience deep dives: Emotions move audiences. This crucial discussion will help uncover opportunities to connect product value to customer needs and subsequently identify the emotional drivers of your customers. Audience deep dives help attain a comprehensive understanding of how your customers make their decisions on the path to purchase.
Based on the knowledge gleaned from the briefing, an agency moderator will lead a work session to narrow down the marketing focus and audience segments across all organizational stakeholders. This sets the foundation for your marketing strategy and communications plan and will assist in the development of crucial tools that will guide all marketing channels and client partners as they work towards the main objectives.
PART 2: THE WORK SESSION TO DEVELOPMENT FUNDAMENTAL TOOLS TO GUIDE A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING STRATEGY
- Audience Personas: A buyer persona is basically a profile of your ideal customer. It describes who they are, what their days are like, the challenges they’re facing, and their relationship with and attitudes about your category. These personas should include audience segments that are vital to business growth, such as distribution and retail customers and influencer segments. To succeed, your brand must resonate with and serve all of these audiences. The persona characterizations help you develop content and allow for all client partners to cohesively position your brand to different audiences based on their specific needs. Personas also act as a lens to evaluate potential marketing channels and determine whether they’re an efficient use of budget. Eventually these personas will also guide the creative strategy and marketing execution.
- Customer Journeys: A customer journey is a roadmap of how each customer segment interacts with your brand, from initial research and discovery to purchase and retention. Derived from the audience deep dives you complete in Part 1, a customer journey map will identify the most appropriate channels and messaging for each of your customer segments so you deliver them in a way that will drive desired actions.
- Marketing Strategy: This is your north star for every activation toward reaching your business goals. Marketing strategy should always be based on real customer insights not just assumptions to be the most effective. It outlines your action plan for overcoming marketing challenges to reach business objectives, from communications strategy to tactical approach.
- Communications Framework: This is an extension of marketing strategy that begins to outline tactical opportunities to convey each brand message to each customer segment within the communications strategy. Outlining priority messages and mapping them back to the marketing strategy gives brands and agencies the opportunity to discuss and align on what they need to say before a full communications plan is developed.
Through these steps, your brand will obtain marketing focus, prioritization, and direction to get your organization on the right path to success. At Rhea + Kaiser we typically recommend in-person workshops as they allow for easier back and forth dialogue, reduced multi-tasking and increased participation. However, we have achieved remote engagement success using a combination of technology and online platforms, such as the use of the Meeting Owl, which virtually brings all participants into the room.
In our next blog, Turning Strategy into Action, we’ll dive deeper into activation of strategy and communication plan development. Remember to also check out the first blog of the series, The Value of Starting with Strategy here.
In the meantime, check out a case study that highlights the success achieved by starting with a marketing workshop. After unveiling their new corporate logo, the Z badge, Zinpro leaders sought to extend the new, bold look and feel across all master brands and product lines. Learn how R+K developed the brand strategy and facilitated roll out for Zinpro.