Is it possible to do tactical marketing without a plan?

Many brands subscribe to the fail fast, fail often approach and look to jump steps with their marketing. They consider both data and gains without perspective of which direction they are running towards. This approach supports the short-term, one-off output but for brands seeking efficacy and efficiency, it is a straight road to trouble.

Is it possible to run your marketing and communications without proper structure and planning?

Of course it is! But that’s the right answer to the wrong question.

Why would you want to run such marketing without the support of a plan in place, to provide sign-posts, steps to optimise and milestones to measure?

It’s the equivalent of being told to “run to the nearest tree, tap it and run back” but with 20 different opinions on which tree is the nearest.

The concept of Fail Fast, Fail Often has its roots in iteration; and being open to experiments, and that many of the experiments will fail thereby creating more data to learn from so eventually, one of the experiments will succeed. The brand benefits from the doing, learning and identifying a data-supported best practice (or tactic) for future use.

Fail Fast, Fail Often is NOT “lean” or “agile” or “do many tactics at the same time without rigour and with insufficient time or budget”. The last bit often shared by decision makers is self-sabotage and does the brand no favours, and in fact sets the marketing team up to fail.

Proper planning and structure ensure that resources are optimised towards accomplishing an objective that supports a business goal. It can be as clear as launching a product, to being as complicated as building a brand with a niche audience. The purpose of the plan (and strategic communications) is to ensure that brand understands the objective, the steps, the positioning and messaging and the various places (channels) that these messages are being shared in and to which target audience or segment.

Without this understanding, or a short-term instruction to “do something” or “achieve some [insert marketing output here]”, decision makers are instead encouraging a culture of speed wins all other factors, and that the failures can be justified by the Fail Fast, Fail Often approach. The marketing team starts to prioritise adding objectives to the calendar in order to check things off while failing quickly, and rushing to complete each tactic at speed therefore failing often.

What does the brand achieve at the end of the sprint? Often, mediocre results and a target audience that does not understand the brand’s differentiating point or niche, and therefore a price war that cannot be won.

We have previously advised a client who was facing pressure from management to do more “things” but without the guidance of fixed business goals, and clear resourcing to support these “things”.

In order to support the client, we built a strategic communications plan that included a workshop on business goals before engineering the marketing objectives and a plan to support outcomes.

Yes, it had a series of marketing-related “things” to measure and demonstrate that work is done. Importantly, it also had a proper timeline and series of milestones to hit that reinforces exactly what work was being done. We also encouraged stronger integration between the marketing and sales teams so each team came to understand their role in co-existence and how marketing can provide leads that convert. This ‘redeployment’ of resources helped management with a clearer picture about how strategy in the C-suite is translated into action by teams that cooperate instead of working within siloes.

---

We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel and technology spaces.

Our principal founder is a registered management consultant, certified and recognised by the Institute of Management Consultants Singapore.

We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.

Areas of support include:

· Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership

· Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution

· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce

· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a seconded marketing and/or PR lead for your brand

Discover more about our services at our website or book an exploratory consultation through this link.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash