We’re now at the stage of execution. You’ve done your research and put in the time and patience to align all the key elements for your strategy. Now it’s time for the exciting bit - implementing your Marketing Strategy!
But hold on a minute…..before we jump in we need to remember that it’s vital to keep everything you produce as consistent as possible so the final message and goal is delivered successfully. Consistency is crucial to ensuring everything lines up to a common goal and your messages are clearly understood. Take tone of voice for example, an often overlooked metric in the marketing mix. If your tone of voice is inconsistent, then things will quickly become confusing for your audience. You would be quite shocked if your friends changed the tone of voice to their personality regularly without cause or reason. In your friends, you look for consistency in their personality that you can rely on in times of need. The same goes for brands.
Branding
A great brand is an incredibly valuable asset. Brand equity is generated around everything from logos and colours to the service and product experience. Companies are continually striving for recognition and longevity in branding. Iconic brand colours such as Tiffany blue or Coca-Cola red are perfect examples of consistent brand equity at the most basic level—colour—that has been built over time into a recognisable heritage from consistent use and perfect execution.
So how do we deliver consistent branding throughout our organisation?
Brand guidelines
This is a master document, the holy grail of your brand, vital in keeping everyone in your organisation on the same page. Everyone involved in implementing your strategy will refer to these pages repeatedly.
Your logo, brand and website colours, font choices, tone of voice and examples will all be outlined in this document. Here is an example of the logo and font brand guidelines used here at Marketing agency - Let’sTalk Strategy.
Hosted alongside the guidelines will be an asset library - perhaps hosted on a shared drive such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Here, all the master files for the logo, brand colours, fonts, etc, will be found where your team can easily gain access and use the assets where needed, unchanged, untouched and in their original state.
Roles and responsibilities
Equally important to branding are your team's roles and responsibilities. A clearly defined structure of what is expected, who will be doing what, and how it will be reported and monitored are essential operation directives for an effective marketing team.
Below is an example of a marketing and sales team structure with outsourced agency support.
Action plan
Forming an action plan is the final piece to forming a consistent implementation plan. Your action plan should detail every move you plan to make, at least in the short term, for you are going to tackle the project. Start and end dates, target personas along with your pre-defined roles and responsibilities will allow you to slowly piece together the basis of your project management approach. Project management can be split into two categories - agile and waterfall. Allowing for the ability to change and adapt direction in your project might be beneficial. This is done by breaking down bi-weekly sprints, with each sprint containing a set of tasks that need to be completed on time. Alternatively, the waterfall approach is a more robust approach in that the plans are set in stone with less opportunity for change. Once it is agreed, everyone follows the end goal until it is achieved.
Whatever your action plan, it is useful to create a performance dashboard for the sake of consistency again, where everything is clearly broken down and labelled by task, audience, date and time, etc..
Next month we will be discussing part 2 for implementing your marketing strategy - Choosing your tactics.
Book recommendations
We’ve only covered a few of the most prominent execution aspects of a marketing strategy here. For a full exploration grab a copy of Jenna’s book, ‘Marketing Strategy: Overcome Common Pitfalls and Create Effective Marketing’.
