As I strove to better understand the benchmarks of a great agency and client relationship, practitioners shared their desire to create or participate in strategy.
Yet often times they are engaged to execute a specific tactic without the context of strategy.
When I asked the question, "What's your biggest frustration?" The answer often had to do with skipping strategy and going straight to tactic. Taking the time to understand the overarching goals and objectives and getting alignment between partners on strategy is imperative but not always easy.
Which tactics you should execute will entirely depend on strategy, but how often have you been asked questions like, "Do you think we should be on Facebook (Twitter, Tumblr, etc)." That answer depends on your brand/messaging strategy, it depends on if your customers are there, it depends first on goal and strategies.
Practitioners who had a methodology for illustrating this process had better buy-in at the beginning and throughout their engagements. Here are just a couple examples:
Ian Lurie, Founder and CEO at Portent Interactive created the Marketing Stack which shows Content, Analytics and Infrastructure as the foundational elements and Paid, Owned and Earned as the channels.
Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute and author of several content strategy and marketing books not only solves problems for brands but he tackles the hard questions and delivers answers for brands and B2B on how to leverage content to grow. Pulizzi's approach is so simplistically brilliant that it is often misunderstood.
There is a great deal of complexity in filling the roles and defining the strategies to deliver a great content marketing program. The beauty is that it focuses on the one thing you can't avoid, your business is driven by relationships, relationships are based on communication.
Great architecture and a strong technical foundation may help your content rank but if that content isn't the right messaging for the right person at the right time it will be ignored. Pulizzi created a 7-step content marketing framework which includes the following:
-Plan
-Audience
-Story
-Channel
-Conversation
-Process
-Measurement
“It is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world.”
Methodologies allow traditional and digital marketers to align on everything from processes to measurement.
Book Excerpt