Marketing Strategies Don’t Implement Themselves

A marketing strategy is business critical especially if you are seeking to either maintain the status quo or grow your business. The next phase after developing a marketing strategy, is creating an implementation plan and hopefully using a project management software (426% more likely to be successful if you do this one move) to ensure that you allocate resources, identity budgetary needs and create a timeline of tactical and campaign deliverables.

Hopefully, if your strategy is developed right, you will have KPI’s across each marketing tactic and asset, clearly identifying exactly what you need to achieve.

We use Robotic Marketer marketing strategy technology platform to fast track this process, taking a mere couple of hours to facilitate a team workshop which is easily achieved due to the software’s question and answer format.

It also takes away the need to develop an implementation plan as the technology spits it out when it provides users with a 50 plus page comprehensive marketing strategy. It also takes the added task of Executive Summary for management teams out of the equation, giving more time to develop creative content and start rolling out a marketing cadence and relevant campaigns.

There are a number of challenges with implementation:

Procrastination

Marketing teams are often caught up in a procrastination phase that creates various issues with getting started. Being held accountable through project management software like Asana is game changing for getting started and delivering to the goals set out in the plan.

Content creation

Finding a resource that creates content and if needed using AI technology like Jasper.ai will help you create content easily and fast. Content must be relevant to your target audience so don’t think that artificial intelligence alone can write all your content for you. You will need a content writer on staff to ensure that content is bespoke to your target audience and capable of cutting through the clutter that target audiences see each day.

Poor Implementation

When strategy is spot on, but implementation is poor, no amount of good strategy will fix the problem. Poor execution of a marketing strategy can cause teams and in particular, management, to doubt strategy, when it is in fact the inadequacy of the implementation

Quick Wins

Everyone is looking for a quick win, but sometimes the best strategy is to ensure that you have a well-executed plan capable of hitting milestones. A quick win may feel good but in the long run, it’s often just that.

Many teams get dissolution when a marketing strategy is not taking off in the way it is intended. Rather than stay on course and work on the quality of the tactic (creative, content, delivery), they give up and change course too fast.

Resources

There are so many resources around marketing strategy – just look it up on Google. But how many resources, books and case studies truly take you through implementation in detail? Few.

Bureaucratic Obstacles

Office politics and managers “preferences” can often slow down or halt the implementation of a marketing strategy. For some managers, it gives credence to leaving a company, and for agencies, quite often when approvals are slow, they lose interest in the account.

In larger organizations, the “owner” of a particular area of marketing might put a roadblock up, or the approval process is slow (at best). Legal is always a challenge especially if they play on the conservative side and of course, there are the new “woke” human resource teams that want to ensure that each campaign speaks to everyone (even if it is not targeting everyone).

Employees that don’t have the talent

The unspoken “implementation killer” is the talent pool. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you may have found the talent pool weak at best over the past 12 months. Many companies are employing “what they can get” rather than the best talent available. When you have a team of average marketers, unless they have a desire to be the best of the best and constantly improve their skills, you may find that the implementation of your marketing strategy reflects this.

A marketing strategy strong creative implementation right tech stack performance monitoring = marketing success. Sounds easy – right? It can be if only you have the right technology: Robotic Marketer for marketing strategy, Mailchimp for email marketing, Nimble for CRM, Adobe’s Marketo for marketing automation, RM digital dashboard SEMRush for SEO and Hootsuite for social media automation. The rest relies on the talent of your team.