CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review | Week 11| Marketing Strategy.

Creating a Research Plan

Why research? Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

A business SWOT analysis can surface where to focus marketing strategy. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and opportunities are things that are helpful to the company. Weaknesses and threats are harmful. Those are negative things. Strengths and weaknesses refer to things that are internal to the company. Since they’re internal to the company, these are things that you can actually impact or change. Opportunities and threats represent things that are happening outside the company. So, what’s going on in the market? These are things that you can’t change, but you can plan for them, and you can take advantage of them.

Interviewing, analyzing, and augmenting

Executing on your research plan not only requires an analytical and scientific mind, but also a sociological approach, which aims to build rapport. Once again, we should be thinking in terms of that SWOT analysis, So, our strengths and weaknesses internally, as well as the opportunities and threats externally out in the market. We’re in search of things like customer profiles, competitive landscape, marketing history, and market trends. We want to ask ourselves what is the story that this data is telling us? We’re trying to create a narrative that’s going to help us decide where to focus, and ultimately, what our strategy is, thinking about the data as we come across it, we can take a mental note of how it might fit into the SWOT analysis.

First, we identified, we want to look at ideal customer profiles, but in doing the research, we actually learned that this exercise hasn’t been done before. So, we’re going to categorize that as an internal weakness, something to be improved, or potentially investigate farther. We also identified that there are inconsistent customer profile types, perhaps being used in the CRM, this is also a weakness. So, we’d put that on your weakness on our SWOT analysis. As we looked at the CRM data, we noticed we were missing data on customer profiles, again, we’re allotting that as weakness. However, we found that there was full data available on the sales process, this is great, something that we can use, this is a strength. As we looked at that available data on the sales process, we noticed there’s a large drop off between lead stage and the opportunity stage, this is a weakness, this is something that we’re going to want to investigate. Then we took a look at the competitive landscape. What did we learn? We learned that competitors are beating us on price. This is a threat. We learned our brand is associated with thought leadership, though, this is an opportunity. So, you can see how, as we go through these different areas, we’re starting to tag them, essentially, with how they might fit in our SWOT analysis. So that we can move forward from that stage.

Using insights to drive strategy

As you’ve been conducting your research, certain elements or insights will stick out to you. What is working really well? What seems to be broken? What hasn’t been tried before?. Let’s remember it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The strengths and weaknesses are internal and things we can have an impact on. Opportunities and threats are external in the market. We can’t change them, but we can take advantage of them.

Here’s our example, and here’s some weaknesses that we identified while we were doing our research. In the product marketing section, there are some pains and weaknesses around customer profiles. In operations, we’ve identified that we’re lacking some core customer data and analytics capabilities, period. Looks like we spent heavily on events but saw no return on that investment. And as for brand, we’re unclear whether we have brand recognition in the market.

There is also some low lead volume on the demand gen side, and when we investigated content and creative, there was a lack of content aligned to the buyer’s journey. So, what are we learning here? Basically, we’re trying to understand the story that is surfacing. What are these insights telling us to do? What has happened in the past? What should happen next? In this example, we might notice that there is some foundational knowledge missing. We also don’t have systems set up properly to be feeding us that foundational knowledge, or maybe we don’t have them at all. These are interesting points, and you can imagine how we might continue to pursue them. Without the foundational information from the systems, it would explain why we have a lack of clarity around the brand. Events, contents, and website are probably also not properly targeted without that customer profile and the tools to analyze how it’s doing. This would probably explain the poor results of the campaign activity. We’re starting to identify some problems and the causes for those problems. This is a pared-down version of what this would look like. You also have three whole other quadrants of this to run analysis for. There are likely connections you will even make between quadrants that also tell another part of the story, and these are all guiding you towards priorities.

Creating a cohesive strategy

All of your research analysis and consensus building has led you to this moment. You’re ready to formulate your very own strategy. Which core marketing areas will you focus on? What do you need to help you with this undertaking? How are you going to get all of this together under a unifying campaign or set of campaigns.

Still feeling like there are too many options for how to even get started with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Narrow down your focus by first tackling foundational elements you identified as missing or broken. This could look like working on more critical data that you’re still lacking, or getting started with systems you need, or even additional third-party research. Second, evaluate if it’s reasonable to organize and run a lean marketing campaign to execute on within a reasonable amount of time. If it makes sense this is a great option, and I strongly encourage you to at least try it out. You don’t want to get in analysis paralysis. You need to move into execution at some point, so you can start learning and then applying that learning to further strategy. Other considerations for building your minimum viable strategy include making sure you’re aligning to corporate vision. Staying focused, making it realistic and achievable, as well as measurable. Thinking of your timeline. So you don’t want things to go on too long but you want it to be a reasonable amount of time to be able to achieve something. Working in an agile and iterative way.

Here’s a system for organizing your strategy and breaking it out into actionable and measurable activities. It’s an OGSM framework. OGSM stands for Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures. You start with your company vision, and your high-level marketing objective. And then you’re going to work through supporting goals, and associated strategies you’ll set to achieve those goals. We’ll then set measures to see if we are successful in executing the strategies. We’ll assign owners and we’ll check in with the results. As you can tell frameworks are a great way to work through different areas of your marketing strategy. It also facilitates sharing your plan in an easy to digest format with other stakeholders who haven’t been with you through this entire process, and in the weeds with all of that data, interviews, research, and more.

Executing your plan

Set yourself up for success with a big kickoff meeting, flexible tools, and best practices. It’s critical for our marketing strategy to have others in the company onboard. Hold a kickoff meeting to explain the methods behind the strategies and what folks should expect to see as results. Connect the dots between marketing objectives and the high-level company mission. We’re going to tell that story that we teased out from the data and how it influences our new plan. And we’re going to get others onboard. We want to be sure to proactively answer the question everyone in the audience, everyone in the company is thinking, “How does this impact me? “How does this connect with my personal goals?”