Building an Effective Marketing Strategy

A good strategy must first clearly understand and recognize the nature of the challenge. Sometimes small business owners cannot clearly see the nature of the challenge. The day-to-day challenges consume their thoughts and actions, and the immediate is always the immediate. A well constructed strategy recognizes the challenges and offers a way of surmounting them. Simply having a desire to overcome them is not good enough. Simply being ambitious is not enough. Motivational speeches will only accomplish so much.

Strategy development is hard work and many don't want to do it. Instead we sometimes charge ahead with ideas and visions and plans that are nor will move us in the direction we know we should go. Strategy is the path you take to overcome the challenge, to eliminate it. If those steps are not clear or can be actually be accomplished you are operating with a faulty strategy.

A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component. It's like having a beautiful car that doesn't have an engine. It looks good, but of little value.

A good strategy will have an analysis of the situation, a guiding policy and coherent action from those responsible for the execution of the strategy. A good strategy has "buy-In" by the team that has the skills to accomplish the task. You could have buy-in by a team that does not have the skill to complete the task. This will result in frustration and failure. Which means your strategy was flawed because you did not take into account the capabilities of your team versus the skills needed by your team.

If your approach to building an effective strategy to accomplish organizational objectives is objective and driven by quantitative and qualitative information you may be on your way to building a strategy that will produce designed intent.