Strategy | StrategyAudit

Is a continuing investment in content valuable?

Jun 25, 2018 | Marketing, Strategy

In early 2014 Mark Schaefer posted a piece titled ‘Content shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy’ on his website.

To me, it is one of the few pieces of truly intelligent strategic thinking I have seen on the topic of ‘Content’.

In the post he poses the proposition that because posting content is free, there would come a tipping point where there was so much content in total, and much of it just regurgitated rubbish, simply generated because it is fashionable, that the impact would be lost.

I think we have passed the point, illustrated in this guest post from Buzzsumo on Mark’s site.

The data certainly confirms what I see on my site, and in my digital travels every day, but we should not be surprised. We all know that if something is free, it carries very little value or credibility.

Why then do we continue producing content?

Simple answer: Because when you produce quality, original, thought provoking, instructive and challenging content, it does still deliver a worthwhile strategic outcome. You become seen as an expert, or at least someone worth talking to in your domain.

Producing such content on a continuous basis is very difficult and time consuming. It has a very long lead time before the benefits kick in, so most either give up, or outsource it and generally end up adding to the pile of digital rubbish.

There is a second significant challenge.

Once you produce this great, useful content, you have to get it seen. The biggest challenge in marketing these days is getting attention, and once having got it, not blowing the chance to do something constructive with it, to engage with those to whom you can add value.

This implies a whole lot of other basic marketing challenges, including that you have identified closely your ideal customer, and that you have a closely defined value proposition for them.

Then you have to ‘find‘ them, by one of any number of means, that can involve any or all of a number of strategies leveraging digital media and social platforms, as well as good old fashioned advertising and networking. Having found them, the next step is to engage them in a process that leads to a mutually beneficial commercial relationship.

Great content can drive all these steps.

Once created, great content is the gift that keeps giving. Even if you do not take the obvious steps of refurbishing great content as videos, longer and shorter versions from a tweet to a book, and reposting on various alternative platforms, a great post will continue to deliver viewers to your site, as does this one for me.

The numbers are not spectacular by any measure, but this is one of many posts that delivers page visits daily, to my StrategyAudit site. Despite being almost 5 years old, this post continues to attract increasing attention, which leads to the opportunity to engage and generate business.

So, the answer to the question in the headline is ‘Yes’, with the caveat that, like almost everything n life, you must be both good at it, and different to the crowd to get noticed.

Photo courtesy Thomas’s pics via Flikr

11 hard lessons from 40 years of building and implementing successful marketing plans

Jun 18, 2018 | Governance, Management, Marketing, Strategy

The key word in that headline is ‘Implementing’. A plan is of little value unless it is implemented, the lessons from the success and failures of that implementation incorporated into the next iteration.

This is not another post about the 55 things to do to have a great marketing plan, this is about the things most forget that are about the organisational and strategic elements that will hinder any successful implementation.

Marketing planning should be a continuous, iterative, and a ‘live’ thing, not a once a year pain in the arse, necessary as a part of the corporate budget process.

To build a plan that serves the purpose of managing the implementation of strategy is a challenging and iterative process of identifying options, and making difficult choices across a host of domains.

Contrary to folk lore, it is a highly data intensive process, with a lot of experience, instinct and skill required that enables connections to be made between pieces of data that may not at first glance have any real relationship. It is not the ‘smoke and mirrors’ some like to think, it is a tough, demanding but ultimately extremely rewarding process when done well.

You need a strategy

A marketing program operates as a part of an overall strategy, without which it is destined to be an expensive indulgence. Marketing is a key part of the delivery mechanism for the strategy. Strategy is all about making the always difficult long term choices, the sort that shape businesses over time, which need to be reflected in the resource allocation and activity decisions which enable implementation.

The importance of context

No enterprise exists in a vacuum. There are a range of factors that exert influence, but over which the individual enterprise has little if any control. The best they can do is accommodate the context into the planning processes, always being aware that factors over which they have no control can change with little or no notice, so retaining the agility to adjust in real time is a profoundly important capability. These factors range from the regulatory regimes, competitive activity, availability of critical capabilities, to long term trends impacting on the economies in which you compete.

The importance of process

Process is simply the way things get done, from start to finish, in effect it is the plan for the plan, the framework upon which the plan is built. A marketing plan is a part of a larger business planning process, Strategic, Capital, Operational, Financial, all have a cause and effect role in overall business planning, and a sensible, achievable marketing program cannot be written in isolation from the other functional planning activities, and that of the overall enterprise. There is a natural flow to all these plans, of both timing and necessary cause and effect impacts. For example, there is no point in a marketing plan setting out to launch a product that requires capital to be spent in the factory unless the item is also included in the capital and operational plans. Equally, there is no point spending capital in the absence of a marketing plan to leverage the benefits of the expenditure.

Iteration, experimentation and learning

We are dealing largely with what might work in the future, and courses with credibility in ‘future- telling’ are few and far between. Therefore it pays to have as many options open as possible. This is not to say we should allow a scatter gun approach to prevail, we should remain focused, but within the parameters of a robust well thought out and understood set of strategic priorities. It is a balancing act, one that is hard to get right, indeed, we only can judge our efforts accurately with the benefit of hindsight. Management of your ‘experimental portfolio’ should be a key task of the senior marketing person, the one who has the power to allocate the resources and hold them accountable, and certainly not left to the junior just to record activities.

Be specific about what you learnt, which forces clarity, and how you know, which forces objectivity in the place of fluffy subjectivity. An intensive After Action Review process should be a core part of any marketing implementation.

Critical thinking

Marketing has always suffered from the tendency to be seen as fluffy, unscientific, and subject to leaping from an inadequately defined problem to a convenient solution. It has lacked credibility in the boardroom, where the big decisions are made. Often in the past that has been a fair characterisation, but there is no longer an excuse.

Most board discussions are based on objective data of one sort or another, which usually means it comes from the past. By contrast, marketing is about the future. It relies on assumption, speculation, and ‘mental models‘ as drivers, so carries less credibility than purely objective data. We now have tools that can deliver some reliability in the cause and effect chains we seek to influence, so long as the hard intellectual graft is done.

If you are to have resources allocated to marketing over the long term that it usually requires to be effective, rather than tied to a changing annual budget cycle, with some artificial calculation tied to sales forecasts, you need credibility. This is where the critical thinking becomes (sorry) Critical! Use of marketing jargon, buzzwords, clichés and opinion may go well in a razzamatazz sales meeting, but where it really counts, at the point where long term resource commitments are made, they are counter-productive. Data and critical analysis is what counts.

In a past corporate life, leading a large marketing function, I insisted on sales forecasts for an initiative of any sort that was going to consume a significant chunk of a marketing budget to be done from several perspectives, and using differing sets of assumptions. The assumptions and perspectives were the subject of the interrogations, rather than just looking at a convenient extrapolation. While we never got a forecast right, the outcomes were generally in the realms of reasonable error, we did better the next time, and most importantly, we had the confidence of the board.

Compass Vs Roadmap

Dwight Eisenhower said ‘In preparing for battle, I have always found plans to be useless, but planning is indispensable’. This is simply a variation on the adage that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy, but adds that the planning is essential. When applied to marketing planning, the same rules apply. To be effective they must drill down to and articulate the drivers and measures of success, provide a framework within which the activity needs to happen, but without dictating the details of the activity. Those facing the situation need to be able to respond to it within the frameworks of the overall strategy and objectives, in real time.

It is the achievement of the objective that is important, not necessarily the means by which it is achieved.

Activities are not outcomes

Too often activities completed are used as performance measures. It may be good to know that an agreed activity has been completed, but of way more importance is the understanding of what happened as a result of the activity.

The better KPI is the behaviour that is the driver of outcomes, rather than some assumption that an activity will deliver an outcome, or some simplistic extrapolation of the past. Results are the outcome of activities that are implemented after consideration of those things both in and out of your control, and will never be as forecast.

Cross Functional

Organisations build a structure to suit their internal processes, it makes the scaling of activity easier. However, customers do not care about your structure, they care about the level of service, quality, timeliness, and all the rest of the factors that add value to them, all of which are all cross functional concerns. Why would you not organise yourself in a manner that reflects what it is that customers are looking for?

Ensuring there is engagement of all functional areas in the development of the marketing plan is essential. They will all play a vital role in the delivery of the plan, and the CMO never has the functional responsibility for them all, so they must be led.

Clear Accountability

Unambiguous accountability tends to focus the mind on the outcomes, which generally leads to better performance. Accountability also however comes with the requirement that the resources are made available to get the job done, properly, which is code for being accountable for the outcomes. The power to allocate resources is a key part of real accountability, rather than just its sibling, ‘responsibility’ which implies completing a specified activity.

In recent times, we have moved from individual accountability to team accountability, which has significantly complicated the management and leadership game, while offering the potential for huge gains in outcome. Holding an individual accountable can be done with just ‘management’, but effectively holding a team accountable for an outcome requires true leadership.

Plans should tell stories

Any plan, to be effective, must tell a story about the journey, the anticipated problems, alternatives considered, and the value of the outcome.

Marketing and importantly, brand building, are all about the stories we tell ourselves, and others, that illustrate how something has given us ‘value’ in some way. Without a simple, illustrative story, all the rest just boils down to price on the day. All the great marketing we see tells a story of some sort that evokes a positive emotion towards the product. Apple tells a story, as did Meadow Lea (they stopped 20 years ago, but the effect lingers) Nike, Coca Cola, so tell yours in the plan.

My kids first dog, ‘Tamba’ was a great friend to them all. She/it played with them for as long as they wanted, protected them, and gave unconditional love, seeking nothing more than a pat behind the ears and a bit of ‘doggy-love’. One day Tamba was a bit subdued, obviously with some version of doggy flu. Off to the vet who gave us some pills to administer, along with instructions. At home I shoved the pill to the back of Tamba’s throat, and held her mouth shut for a while. As I let go, to her obvious relief, thinking the pill would be swallowed, up it came, back into my hand, a mess of dissolved pill and dog saliva. My neighbour, a ‘dog whisperer’ recommended I hide the pill in a spoonful of Vegemite on a square of toast, and offer it to Tamba. Whoof… gone! No pill.

I am constantly reminded of this story as I talk to clients, and watch marketing activity designed to generate a response. It is all facts, data, dry boring old stuff that has no emotion. It is like trying to get Tamba to take the pill, impossible until it was wrapped in something she loved.

Even the best plan does not implement itself

Planning is only the first step, one that without implementation is pointless. As my old dad used to say, 1/10 for the plan son, the other 9 points are reserved for implementation.

Is the content bandwagon terminally broken?

Jun 14, 2018 | Marketing, Strategy

Back in 2014 Mark Schaefer wrote a prescient post he called ‘Content Shock’, in which he put the position that content marketing as it was then being practised was not a sustainable strategy.

Nearly 5 years ago, this was akin to heresy.

However, just like many others who have questioned the accepted wisdom over the years, time has proven him absolutely right.

Buzzsumo director Steve Rayson has released the Buzzsumo 2018 Content trends report, which is a compellingly sensible document for marketers, and should be read alongside Mary Meekers recently released 2018 Internet Trends report. Buzzsumo is a tool that analyses content, what is being shared and linked across the web, millions of interactions a day, so they are in a prime position to see the trends.

So many climbed onto the content bandwagon that the wheels have fallen off!

The sheer volume of material being posted has outrun our ability to even see it let alone absorb it, and why should we bother, when there is so much repetition, unoriginal thinking, and ‘salesey’ rubbish being published.

Which brings me to a conclusion in several parts about what marketers need to do to gain and keep the attention of those who are bombarded with content every day:

Be original and of relevance to a market niche. Without both of these elements your content, irrespective of its form, will just add to the pile in the trash folder.
Focus, focus, focus. Never was the old cliché ‘you cannot be all things to all people‘ more relevant. The tighter and more consistent the focus on your market niche, the better.
Own your own digital real estate. Relying on social platforms is a mugs game in the long run. It can get you short term ‘results’, but what really counts are the recommendations of satisfied customers, and referrals from those who have some authority. Public platforms are not there for you, they are there to sell access to you to advertisers wanting to reach you, and they make all the rules. Owning your own digital home is not much different to owning the one you live in vs renting, you make the rules; you decide who is welcome, who is not, and why.
It is no longer easy. 15 years ago when all this digital stuff was new, just being there gained attention, recognition, and influence. By 2014 when the Content Shock post was written, it had reached what appears to be a tipping point, and just being there was no longer enough. As noted, Mark Schaefer saw that point before anyone else, and hindsight has proven him right. Now, half way through 2018, he is more right than ever, as the pile of trash mounts exponentially every day. Being relevant, interesting, and able to engage a market niche is extraordinarily challenging, and cannot be done in your spare time, or by the summer intern.
Content can still be enormously powerful. When there is so much crap around, when you are good, it shows. It may take a while to gain momentum, critical mass, and ultimately impact, but it can be done. The best content appeals to the heart before the mind, it evokes an emotional response before the rational one, and this is best done one by one. Interestingly, in this age of digital everything, the old fashioned hand written letter is regaining its place as a powerful communication tool, because it is now unusual, but more importantly, requires real effort and commitment to be present. We all respond positively to effort and commitment when made personally to us.

When you would like some expert help thinking about all this, we should talk.

Photo credit: Wendy via Flikr

Mary Meeker 2018 KPC&B Internet trends report

Jun 6, 2018 | Governance, Management, Strategy

The 2018 KPC&B report is now out, and gathering views on Slideshare like a runaway train. The amount and speed of the attention given to this now annual report is evidence that it has become the benchmark for analysis of the digital communication trends that we live with every day, but do not necessarily see.

The report has become one of the most influential pieces of content published, and it is a monster!

While I have no intention of trying to summarise, a few things just jump out.

While growth of the net may be slowing, at a reach now above 50% of the worlds population, what would you expect. Within that total reach, US platforms remain the global giants, but being hunted by the Chinese who are spreading out of home base where they utterly dominate to the rest of the world.
Buying via the net, so called ‘e-commerce’ is now so deeply entrenched, that it is now just another part of ‘commerce’. Amazon outside China dominates, and is also dominating in R&D spend, translating into an avalanch of innovation. Inside China, it is a very different picture. The Chinese platforms are all there is, and are in the early stages of going after an international presence. It seems that the Chinese have jumped the hard asset stage in the development of communication and payment systems, going straight to mobile. No legacy questions of any type to be negotiated, which can only accelerate the potential rate of growth.
Ad spending on mobile is now more than half digital ad spending. The implication of this is the degree to which the ads will evolve rapidly towards highly personalised messages, when combined with AI and geo location.
Of particular interest to Australian FMCG retail, is slide 108 which shows the price and market share changes in the top 20 US grocery retailers. We have the top two gorillas here still retaining above 70% market share, not the 20% that Walmart holds in the US as the gorilla brand. If the US experience is mirrored here, and I see no reason why it will not, the message would be a ‘sell’ on Coles and Woolies shares. Not a happy thought for either as they must be contemplating large investments just to remain in the game, let alone retain their current position.
The nature of work continues to evolve way faster than our capacity to absorb the changes. I suspect the social dislocation that will result in this country are only just beginning to be felt.
There is plenty of data coming at us that tells us video is the new big guy in town. This report confirms it, again.

This report is required reading and deep consideration, for anyone thinking about digital, and the shape of the world we will be living in, and isn’t that all of us?

Is the supermarket business model about to be retired?

May 30, 2018 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy

The face of the supermarket in the 2030’s is emerging, and I suspect it is not a face most of us will warm to immediately. The combination of artificial intelligence and the capacity to automate just about everything will render much of the current supermarket business model obsolete.

The model of Amazon Go and Chinese Hema supermarkets will apply particularly to convenience stores, in high traffic high rent areas, like the inner city and business centres. Our grocery shopping will be done on line by voice, and delivered by some amalgam of autonomous vehicle, Amazon, Ocado, or delivery services like FedEx, Uber and others that will spring up, which will hook up with the owners of the automated Pick ‘n Pack warehouses.

Amazon Alexa and other technology deploying voice ordering ensures a limitation of options, to those that favour the seller. With voice, we get the convenience of ordering from the couch, but in exchange we give up the visual cues of a store where we usually have several options, with differing characteristics and price points, and the resulting capacity of marketers to hang their hats on a point of differentiation to a group of consumers, a niche in the market. Voice removes all that, and will offer you only the one or two that the seller recommends, but their recommendations will be based on their commercial objectives, revenue, margin, and stock rotation, not yours, which are likely to be entirely different.

The recently announced deal between Ocado and Kroger adds a whole new dimension. Ocado is the first entirely e-commerce grocery business that I am aware of, to have leveraged themselves into a controlling position, and it took a while. Like all on line supermarkets, it struggled with fresh produce, and the higher customer acquisition costs that are the result of having no physical shops. Ocado launched in 2000, went public in 2010, but did not turn a profit until 2014, a modest 7 million quid on a turnover of a billion. The logic appears to be developing and licencing their technology, but little happened beyond the deal with the John Lewis owned Waitrose until Amazon bought Whole Foods in August 2017, which jump-started a rush into the technology to automate order receipt, pick, pack, and delivery. Suddenly everyone was chasing them, and in November 2017 a deal was struck with Casino in France, and talks with others advanced quickly, culminating with the Kroger deal.

Kroger is deeply threatened by the Whole foods purchase by Amazon, and while Wal-Mart dominates US grocery, Kroger is a strong second, but has not had a viable on line offering. The potential for Amazon to convert some or all of Whole Foods sites into local delivery warehouses seems pretty real to me, which would give the relatively low on line grocery share in the US (estimated at 1.5% Vs 7.5% in the UK) a real kick along, and potentially add Kroger to the conga line of US retailers heading for the liquidator. From Ocado’s perspective, the deal offers access to the biggest grocery market in the world for their technology, and led to a share price jump that will be making patient investors reach for the bubbly.

If we think that here in Australia we are insulated from all this, we are in la la land. While the distances here add to the complication, it is a predictable number, and therefore manageable by algorithm. I predict that one or both of the gorillas will be on a plane to talk to Ocado very quickly, if they have not already, although Coles might be pre-occupied with moving out of home, and resetting up in their own digs. Wesfarmers have been badly burnt by the Bunnings foray into the UK, brought to an embarrassing end last week by the sale of the former Homebase business for 1 pound, and would I suspect be wary of supporting an investment of this type for a departing problem child. It might just be an ideal time for Woolies to get a jump on them?

4 questions to enable you to extract maximum leverage from your marketing investment

May 28, 2018 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy

Imagine you are faced with the task of joining two pieces of wood.

What information are you likely to need before deciding how to go about the task?

How big and important are the pieces? Are they structural weight bearing? Is the joint going to be seen? And so on.

So: you have the information; you can then decide how you go about the joining. Do you nail? Screw? Glue? Combine rebate glue and screw? Countersink the screw? And so on. You have many options, but without the contextual information, you cannot make an informed decision that will give you the best outcome.

Sometimes this is easy, instantaneous, other times it will require more time and research to get the right answer.

Figuring out your marketing programs is no different.

How are you going to allocate your limited resources across all the possibilities that face you?

Marketing has only one purpose, to generate revenue. Sometimes it is revenue today. Sometimes tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade. If you cannot see a connection between the marketing activity and future revenue, stop now!

The challenge is to know enough to ask informed and intelligent questions, and be able to separate the bullshit from the good answers.

This ‘marketing game’ is full of sellers of new shiny toys that are ‘guaranteed’ to be the answer to all your commercial problems, delivering you rivers of cash.

In order to help you separate the bullshit from the reality, there are four tools you can use to do the separation, which will assist you too see the connections to revenue.

They all are interdependent, none by themselves is of great value, and together they are a powerful way of thinking about your business.

The 4 seem simple at first glance, but in reality very complex questions, that in combination will give you the beginnings of an answer. The rest will come with experience and domain knowledge.

What problem can I solve for a potential customer, or put another way, how do I add value?
Who is my ideal customer?
How do I apply maximum marketing leverage?
How do I make a profit?

When you have the answer to these four questions, you are ready to spend some money.

Not before.

However, once answered, it is never enough to stand still and think the answers tomorrow will be the same as today, and that the answer today is the ideal one. Business is iterative, you learn from doing, experimenting, doing it better next time. It is an evolutionary process, so long as you are careful not to bet the farm on a dud horse. These are all connected to each other, one without the other is of less value, and the impact of answering them all well is not just cumulative, it is compounding.

There is never one right answer, the interdependencies are huge, as are the options, it is all incremental, a process of improvement and no good answer remains the best one forever.

These four factors, and all the lesser things that hang off them, are compounding.

The twist is that they also compound in reverse, so you have to be prepared to try things, but get them off the table quickly when they do not work.

A little detail on the 4 questions.

What problem can I solve?

Unless you can solve a problem for someone why would they buy from you?

Albert Einstein, my senior marketing guru, said, amongst other things, “If I had an hour to solve a life defining problem, I would spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem, the rest is just maths’

So, do your research before you jump in.

The definition of how you solve the problem becomes your value proposition. In other words, how does what you do add value to the lives of those ideal customers?

If you cannot articulate that, you have nothing except price, and nobody wins a price war.

The solutions to problems come from being able to ask the right questions.

Seeing things others do not see, solving problems better than others, and sometimes seeing a potential problem before it is an acknowledged problem, highlighting it, and then solving it.

The classic case is the iPod. It was not the first MP3 player, and arguably it was not the best technically, but it did something no other mP3 player did. It put ‘1000 songs in your pocket’. It articulated the problem that the product solved.

While others all talked about their technical superiority, the stuff the geeks thought was important, Apple just told us what consumer problem they solved.

Who is my ideal customer?

Who is your ideal customer, the one who will not haggle the price, who loves the product you sell, and proselytises for you? Knowing that person in great detail would be marketing and commercial gold.

Like all gold, it is hard to find, subject to all sorts of distractions and false starts, but immensely valuable when discovered, and discovery is usually incremental, rather than a ‘eureka’ moment. This means it is also a demanding challenge.

What is often also forgotten in the effort to define that ideal customer is that every customer also has an ideal supplier, one who meets all their needs, delivering value in excess of the cost to them. It is a two way street, and a relationship only prospers where there is value being delivered to both parties.

Defining your ideal customer is an iterative process, deceptively demanding, as it requires choices about who is not an ideal customer, and therefore excluded from primary consideration. Choices like this are challenging, but necessary, particularly for small and medium businesses which do not have the luxury of a big pot of marketing money, you have to get it right or waste limited resources.

Following is a list of 6 parameters you can use. Not all will be equally applicable in every situation, but it will pay to give each deep consideration.

Who: Is the demographics they may exhibit. Where they live, age, gender, education, job, and all the other quantitative characteristics that are available. These parameters are pretty much all that was easily available in any detail until digital tools came along.

What: are their behaviours. Do they go to the opera or rock concerts, perhaps both, do they travel overseas for holidays, what sort of causes, if any, do they support, are they likely to demonstrate their beliefs publicly, or are they just internal. All the sorts of things that offer a picture of how they think, feel, and behave in all sorts of situations.

Where: will you find them digitally, as well as in the analogue (perhaps real) world, and what means can you use to make a connection. Are they likely to be avid users of Facebook, LinkedIn or other social platforms, are they comfortable buying on line, do they ‘showroom’ digitally then visit the physical retailer, do they get their news from Facebook and Reddit, or more focused news sites, or even, surprise, surprise, newspapers, radio and magazines.

When: will they be ready to buy? Customers are rarely ready to buy when you are ready to sell. Understanding the customer buying cycles, particularly in B2B and a larger purchase is critical.

Why: should they respond to your entreaties, to do whatever it is you are asking of them. What is your value proposition to them? What promise of a new and better tomorrow can you deliver? What can you deliver that is different and more valuable to them than any alternative? If you cannot answer these questions, it will come down to price, and winning a price war is a great way to go broke.

How: will you service the transaction, and the subsequent relationship that may emerge? This is usually down to questions about your business model and the ‘fit’ that has with the customer.

How do I make a profit?

Just as a successful young single male professional might opt for a red sports car, when 10 years later, with a family, kids, soccer practise, he might opt for a brick on wheels, you can have different business models to suit different circumstances and conditions.

Most small and medium businesses with which I have been associated give little if any thought to the business model, but it is of critical importance.

Are you retail, wholesale, franchised, subscription, digital, or some combination? All are different, working in differing ways, to allocate and absorb the costs and benefits that accrue. Being very clear about your business model, and being able to anticipate if a potential customer will fit is in some circumstances, a vital component of making a profit.

How and where do I apply Maximum Marketing Leverage?

Identifying the point at which you can apply Maximum Marketing Leverage (MML), or in other words, get the most productivity from your marketing investment is the point at which the previous three questions intersect.

Answering the three questions well requires a combination of introspection on your business, in combination with exospection, the examination of your business from an external perspective. The point where these two perspectives intersect is the best spot to apply marketing leverage.

Most will be familiar with the SWOT model of business analysis; this is one of many, and perhaps simplest of the many ‘Mental Models’ you can use to do the examination. Porters 5 forces, Balanced Scorecard, BC matrix, Business Model Canvas, and many others are alternatives. All have their pros and cons, but the key point is that you give due consideration to them, as they will identify and clarify your point of MML.

The ‘maths’

All that has gone before, in Albert’s language, is the definition of the problem. Now we get to the maths, the way in which you apply the leverage.

Most small businesses rush straight to the tools of leverage without due consideration of the nature of the problem they want the tools to solve. However, once defined, pick a tool, or most often a combination of tools that best fits your point of leverage and apply them, recognising that there is no formula to give you thee exactly right answer, so you need to experiment to find the best outcomes. The process of experimenting, will also give greater clarity to the 4 questions, which will in turn clarify the point of MML.

The choices you face are multitudinous.

Digital, analogue, which social platform, how much should be spent on Adwords, does Facebook work, how to use the automation tools available, what about email, letterbox drops, and so on, and on, and on. 20 years ago, life was much simpler, there were few choices, but there was also very few of the tools available that enabled the identification of the point of MML, so experimenting was far more costly and risky than it is now, to the point where small businesses had very few options. Now you have plenty, the challenge is to use them in the best possible manner.

However, there are three things you should always remember, and apply.

Customers and potential customers move through a decision making process every time before they put their hands in their pockets. Sometimes this is almost instantaneous, as it would be in a supermarket doing the weekly shop, much of it is on ‘auto-pilot’. By contrast when buying a new car, house, or even considering a restaurant, the decision is usually much more considered, research is done, options considered, a short list compiled before a decision is make. This process happens in many ways, and can be influenced by the marketer using different tools, and combinations of tools at different times in the process.
The tools themselves are only as good as the message that is delivered. Whether you are writing an ad for the local newspaper or sending a series of emails to your prospect list, you need to be able to write and design a piece of communication that will engage the reader, give them the information they are looking for at that specific time, and lead them to the next point in the purchase process. In other words, in the vernacular, you need to be able to produce a variety of ‘content’
The one tool that should be in every toolbox is your own website. This is your digital home, the spot you own, from which you can communicate with your ideal customer under your terms. The trick of course is to have a website that accurately reflects the answers to the four questions and directs the tools to the point of MML. Most SME’s recognise the need for a website, and either lack the skills to do it themselves, or get a contractor to do it, usually without reference to the 4 questions. Then you end up with a nice looking but not revenue effective website. It is a vital but challenging tool to get right.

A few final but general points about running a successful SME, that are nevertheless vital but rarely get enough attention.

Referrals are the best and cheapest form of marketing; it just takes time and effort to get to the point where current customers will refer you to others. Get this right, and many of your marketing problems will be solved, so it makes sense to have a formal referral process in place.
You must understand your ‘numbers’. The accounts, Cash flow forecasts, revenue, cost and customer analysis and forecasts. The Pareto principal, well known as the 80/20 rule applies in every circumstance. Sometimes it is 90/10, rarely is it 70/30.
Marketing cannot be left to the last minute, it is absolutely essential you identify your MML before you start spending your limited resources.
Social media is not free, despite the rumours, it costs not only in time and effort, as well as design costs to be effective, the quid pro quo is that you give over a heap of personal information that the social platforms then use to market to advertisers. There are no silver bullets in the quest for success.

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