Level-Up: Your Strategy to Sustainable Marketing-Driven Growth

By Raine Gaisford

" While marketing is complex, it need not be complicated "

 

Put simply, a good marketing strategy helps organisations achieve their objectives from the right amount of effort and financial investment. Conversely, marketing without a strategy results in wasted investments and generally disappoin

• Language: English
• Publisher: LimeHub Pty Ltd
• Release date: Aug 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645252316

Raine Gaisford

Raine Gaisford is a successful marketer and entrepreneur. She is the founder of LimeHub, a niche B2B marketing agency servicing clients across Australia and New Zealand. Raine is a marketing subject-matter expert in the technology industry having worked with many of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world. When not working on growing her clients' businesses you will find her tinkering with emerging no-code platforms seeking new and innovative ways to solve problems.

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Strategic Objectives

Marketing objectives should always align with, or be nested into, higher-level business objectives. In the enterprise space, these higher-level business objectives are influenced by a vast array of factors, including but certainly not limited to their unique corporate values and stakeholder and shareholder objectives. Furthermore, larger organisations have more complex structures and hierarchies through which these high-level business objectives cascade down and which in turn influence or determine the objectives of other business units — including marketing.

There is typically much less organisational complexity in the SSSMB space and often the business objectives directly dictate the marketing objectives. As a result, enterprise businesses typically each have unique and specific nested, but sharply focused, objectives across the business, whereas SSSMBs often adopt a set of more or less universal objectives. These universal objectives are the ones we are going to be focusing on for the purposes of this strategy.

While changes in consumer expectations and technology have impacted the commercial environment, including the popularisation of ethical business motives, there remain a few universal constants. The most critical constant is that organisations need money to operate, so revenue generation is paramount. This is the assumed business objective we will be focusing on. Key factors that influence an organisation’s ability to generate revenue include market awareness, customer acquisition and customer retention. These factors determine our assumed marketing objectives: create a stronger brand, get more customers and keep more customers. While these objectives are broad for the purposes of this exercise, you will be refining them specifically to your organisation over the months to come as your marketing function matures.

It is always prudent to check these marketing objectives against your business’s objectives to ensure alignment. In the event that there is significant misalignment between your business objectives and these marketing objectives, you should not continue with this marketing strategy as it will guide you away from your business objectives. I am confident, however, that these marketing objectives will be appropriate in many instances.

Strategic Operating Model

The strategic Operating Model covers the operational specifics of the execution of a strategy. Put simply, it outlines who will be accountable for the strategy, who will deliver it, and how it is managed and measured.

The Operating Model has six key design layers which help organisations:

Since each organisation implementing this strategy will have a different structure and access to resources, I have incorporated parts of the development of the Operating Model into the Execution Roadmap where possible. It will be up to you, the reader, to appoint accountability and operational delivery depending on the resources available within your organisation, so for the very first task of your strategy, you will need to determine some of the fundamentals of your Operating Model.

Task One

For the first task of your strategy, answer the questions below and document them in your Operating Model. It will be a working document that will need updating throughout the execution of your strategy. I have included prompts in relevant sections to ensure that once the strategy is complete, you will have a comprehensive Operating Model that can be used in future strategies.

1 - Who within your organisation will be accountable for the success of the