I’ve heard a lot of both young and seasoned marketers talk about how they often get the feedback “you need to be more strategic.” I’ve even heard this myself and realized that we all need to be better at separating “strategy” from what I call the “theater of strategy.”
Building a good marketing strategy is not sexy. It’s a ton of research and thinking and testing hypotheses. Usually this is happening in a Word/Google doc or excel sheet (or if you’re like me, in a variety of colors on a whiteboard that looks like something out of A Beautiful Mind but less elegant).
All of that is the strategy. But what a lot of people are actually expecting to see is the ‘theater.” They want the snazzy deck, the creative mock ups, the polished video. They want to see a show about the strategy. And while, yes, there is value in generating excitement and building consensus around a strategy – that little performance is not more important than building a strategy with substance.
Also, a lot of marketers are stretched thin. They either have time to build a solid strategy OR produce a show about a strategy – and not usually both. Also, often the people giving the “be more strategic” feedback can’t articulate what that means because either they don’t realize that what they want is the show or they don’t know what a good Marketing strategy actually looks like.
A Marketing strategy, again, is not sexy. When you really break it down, a good marketing strategy covers who, what, where, when and why for both the prospect/customer and the company:
Prospect/Customer
- Target Audience (who)
- Product/Solution (what)
- Channels (where)
- Frequency (when)
- Messaging/Benefit (why)
Company
- Sales team/SMEs involved (who)
- Product with pricing (what)
- Funnel stage (where)
- Timing (when)
- Outcomes/objectives (why)
A great strategy will have depth, proof points, and creativity built into all of those areas, but won’t typically include the creative mock ups, videos, sample headlines, etc because those are tactical things that come after the strategy – they are the execution – the theatrical performance of the strategy.
The disconnect between what Marketing strategy is and what non-marketing leaders expect to see in a strategy causes friction and a lot of wasted time and resources. If a CMO has to lean too far into putting on a show vs doing the deeper, substantive work to create a strong strategy, it will compromise the success of a Marketing program in the longer term, resulting in lower ROI, team burn out, frustration, and overall ineffectiveness.
So how can we solve this? CEO and CMOs need to have honest conversations to build a shared understanding and shared language around what Marketing is, how Marketing strategy is expressed and the differences between strategy and sample tactics.
