7 Signs Your Strategy Lacks Clarity

Strategic clarity is essential if an organisation is to use its resources wisely to drive superior performance, with higher revenues and profits and a happier workforce the principal beneficiaries.

Below are 7 indicators which suggest a strategy is lacking a clear sense of purpose. How many of these affect you, or the people around you?

1. Priorities and goals seem to jump around at a moment’s notice
2. Urgency wins over importance
3. Many cannot confidently articulate their top priorities, let alone those of the company
4. The tail is wagging the dog; new ideas and events derail current plans
5. Cynicism and resignation are more common than enthusiasm
6. There are too many priorities (which means there really are no priorities)
7. The organisation invests significant time and money in projects that produce little in the way of tangible results

If you see any of these signs, either your company’s strategic direction is too fuzzy, fleeting, unstable or broad. Or your organisation has not translated it sufficiently to obtain useful guidance from it. Either way, the organisation is under-prepared to make wise investment decisions.

If you need any help clarifying your strategic priorities, or support in communicating your strategy to customers and employees, give us a call on 07867 543 296 or email us by clicking here.

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Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Marketing for 2019

Most companies have been outsourcing a portion of their marketing function for many years - advertising.

But increasingly, expertise in marketing lies outside the walls of the traditional firm. In research, strategy optimization, multi-channel digital development, customer management and many more disciplines, project work is outsourced to experts. And that’s why more and more companies are turning to marketing partners like Lucidity London.

When we’re asked “when should I outsource my marketing?” our response is clear and simple: when it’s not a core competency.

Of course, it’s often a more complicated decision than that. But in our experience of working with clients over the past 10 years, the main reasons which prompt our clients to work with us include:

#	Reason	Scenarios Given
1	Access to expertise	gain access to the expertise and skills needed to perform key marketing tasks, and hook up with talent that may not be attracted working in-house
2	Expert point of view	get unbiased insights and a fresh perspective on the development of a realistic but high performing marketing strategy, and then implement it
3	Safe pair of hands	experienced, qualified project management with links to high quality suppliers e.g. researchers, web designers, photographers, printers and event organisers
4	Up-to-date tools	modern tools and techniques for defining the marketing strategy, reaching the target market and meeting objectives
5	Release time	tick marketing details off the to-do list, reduce time consuming liaison between suppliers and free up precious management time
6	Increase flexibility	options for support in executing a one-off project or for two days a week implementing the marketing strategy
7	Keep costs down	marketing expertise without the commitment and cost of employing full-time employees while maintaining high standards of execution
8	Bring new ideas and thinking	develop new services and campaigns required to get, keep and grow customers
9	Mentoring and training	provide direction to an inexperienced employee, junior marketing team or executive team on an specific topic e.g. multi-channel retail
10	Boost quality	improve the quality of marketing as the business grows while professionalizing the marketing competency

 

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Uh-oh, Budget-Setting Time's Coming !

Some marketers let their finance people set their budget and faff about with tactical stuff until mid-September, when they are issued with the expectations for 2015.
So, for example, the head of finance might instruct their marketers that next year they're expected to grow top-line revenues by 7% and achieve sales of £8m. They are also told that their marketing budget for the year ahead will be £320k based on the 4% advertising-to-sales ratios that the company uses to derive marketing budgets.
It can look deceptively logical until you look at where these numbers come from. As one of my favourite clients likes to put it – they all derive from the SOOMA Database – SOOMA standing for Straight Out Of My Arse.
The 7 per cent growth rate isn’t based on strategy or research. It comes from arbitrary growth expectations that your board or global team have applied to your business, irrespective of the fact that they have seen no data and probably not even visited your market in years.
The 4 per cent ratio of revenue to marketing spend is doubly stupid. First, because it is another completely arbitrary number (why not 10 per cent, or 2 per cent?) that senior managers deem acceptable. Second, because this ratio is applied after the £8m revenue expectation has already been set, it is clearly derived from a belief that marketing is not an investment that can increase revenues but rather a cost that we must pay each year, irrespective of sales.
The serious point about all this is that when a company sets a budget for 2015 this way, all strategy dies. Any serious marketer will realise that if the numbers and the investment levels are already in place long before they have even looked at research or strategy for the year ahead, he or she is literally pointless. The joke is on any and every marketer that accepts these bullshit budgets and works within their parameters for a whole year of their life.
It does not have to be this way. The smart way to build a marketing budget does not start top-down with the senior finance team but rather begins bottom-up with the marketing department.
The financial plan for a calendar year will always be set between September and October, so it’s crucial that marketers don’t wait for a moronic number but rather start working on their proposed 2015 strategy now.
That might sound early, because it is. But if you don’t get the strategy in before the budgets are set in September, you will be lost in stupid-land like everybody else.
A smart marketer collects research in July and August. They build and populate their segmentation. They decide on their targets for 2015 and then, crucially, decide on their objectives for each segment. Here you will note that I am not talking about the flaccid, open-ended objectives that populate most firms. You know the type – “Improve brand sentiment among young adults”. I am talking about SMART objectives you can hang your hat on and pay bonuses on – “Increase brand preference among the ‘Out to Lunch’ segment from 29 per cent to 65 per cent by 1 December 2015”.
Once you set a real objective, you can work out what it’s worth. Annualise the figure for 2015 and go and brief your agencies. Share the objectives with them and ask them to come back with tactics and associated costs. Put all that together and you have a bottom-up, strategic budget to propose to top management. You can propose how much money you need and how much money you can generate in the year ahead.
Or you can sit about monitoring how many followers you have on Twitter for another four months until some guy from finance looks at a line chart for 10 minutes and tells you what to achieve.
If you need any help or advice getting your marketing budget straight for your next meeting with the FD, give us a call on 0208 241 3730 or email us at info@luciditylondon.com

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Spectacular Marketing Failures

Just a short video to show you that, with all the best intentions in the world, even the smartest marketing organisations completely mess things up! Click on the Read More link to see the video ...

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Marketing Strategies for SME’s in a Slow Economy

10 Ways to Attain, Retain or Maintain Customers


1) Think big and audit your time
No matter the size of your business, place a mental image in your mind as if you are the largest and most successful person in your industry. How much time is consumed by routine office work which someone else should be doing? Spend more time on more important tasks such as marketing strategies, improving relationships with customers, and implementing new strategies to expand your services.

2) Be different and stand out from the competition
To offer, or at least appear to offer, better products and/or services than your competitors, you need to innovate continually. So, keep your approach fresh by finding out what your customers need, and then find solutions to those problems. How do you make this happen? Talk to your existing customers. Conduct a survey of current major issues they face. This will give you a starting point around which to construct new ideas. Do this regularly and you will build up an ever-growing pool of new ideas. You’ll also stay at the cutting edge of your industry because you will be tackling current problems.

3) Build relationships with your customers
As each month goes by, you lose contact with up to 10% of your customers. Create a customer database and keep in contact with them on a regular basis. Send a postcard, a birthday card, a promotional flyer, a newsletter etc. to keep your name, phone number, and service at the top of their mind when they consider purchasing in your category.

4) Collect E-Mail Addresses
As part of your customer relationship process get permission from your customers to use their E-mail address. Periodically send updates and notices to your client list. As long as you have their permission and avoid overuse, e-mail can be a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool. A local pizza delivery service ran an anniversary promotion offering a pizza for the 1980’s price. To get this special price, customers had to go to their website and register their email address. A special anniversary coupon was then emailed to them. They collected 500 email addresses in just two days !

5) Avoid poisonous personalities
Negative and unfriendly employees cost you money by chasing customers away. Spend more time and money interviewing and hiring the right people, especially those who enjoy helping people. Use behaviour based interviewing and screening assessments to improve your chances for hiring success.

6) Put a shopping cart on your website
Online sales are still growing at a dramatic pace. According to IMRG/Capgemini’s e-Retail Sales Index, gross e-retail sales were estimated to be worth £4.5 billion in June 2010, up 22% compared to the same month last year. This increase is coming from people who want to save time, followed closely by avoiding crowded stores, and the ability to shop outside of store hours. Make an audit of what services and products you can offer online.

7) Pay-per-click advertising
Many business owners are cutting back on classified advertising, instead they’re using pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click will ensure you receive top visibility on websites driving more customers to your door. Advertisers bid on keywords and the more popular the keyword, the more expensive each click is. Prices vary between a few pence to many pounds. The most popular pay-per-click advertisers are found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

8) Use customer service commandments to create good habits
The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain invented the use of Customer Service Commandments, outlining specific behaviours employees are to demonstrate when dealing with customers and fellow employees. They print the commandments on a small card and employees carry it with them at work. Furthermore, supervisors reinforce good customer service by quizzing employees on one commandment each day, and reward those that respond correctly.

9) Take your message to the media
Local newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations are always looking for stories and topics of interest. If you’ve got some good news, collaborate with the media and let your customers, suppliers and everyone else know how wonderful your business is. Do you have an event planned, a new service to launch or an interesting story with a regional angle to tell? If so, let the local (or even national) media know about it through a press release.

10) Take advantage of trends
For some the economic downturn is an opportunity in disguise. A recent study by leading management consultancy Bain & Company found that twice as many companies make the leap from laggards to leaders during a recession than during periods of economic calm.

No one can predict the future with any degree of certainty, but you can get a handle on trends, which is one way to take advantage of change and convert risks into opportunities. The ability to spot trends before others is, of course, extremely difficult, however if you want to get ahead of your competition you must try to understand drivers of change to discover new opportunities. For example, you could ask your best customers how to improve their level of satisfaction with your products and/or services.

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