Five Steps to Make Your Agency’s Strategy a Success

Five Steps to Make Your Agency’s Strategy a Success

Virtually every organization is familiar with the idea of developing a marketing or business strategy. In this blog article, we’ll list five steps of a robust agency strategy. Adhering to a similar plan with its various processes can help make your agency’s strategy a success.

Step One: Mission, Goals, Objectives

A successful marketing strategy typically begins by a group of executives and managers defining the company’s overall mission, goals, and objectives. It’s important that agencies make wise decisions about these elements, as they can be of great consequence down the line.

While these concepts have some conceptual overlap, there are some important distinctions to be made. For instance, at this step goals are conceived as broader in scope, while objectives are considered to be clearly defined with explicit parameters.

On the one hand, an objective might be to increase sales by 10%. On the other, a goal might be to achieve international recognition at a brand level. The former is specific, while the latter more generalized. Meanwhile, a company mission is even broader in scope in that it often deals with intangible aspects.

Here’s the mission statement from the company InVision, which makes a popular design prototyping platform:

Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. The design is Everywhere. Integrity.

Mission statements such as this one are much more abstract and less directly measurable than goals or objectives. But once identified, together they compose the first step of in an agency’s strategy.

Step Two: Industry Positioning

The next step is to analyze your agency’s positioning within the industry, which includes identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats posed to your success in the market. Strengths and weakness are what you do well and what needs improvement, while opportunities include things like trends that can be leveraged to your advantage.

This step can be easily remembered as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). What’s important here is that this process involves both a reflection on your agency’s internal attributes, as well as its positioning relative to the industry as a whole along with overall trends. With a clear understanding of these elements, this step is a crucial part of an agency’s strategy.

Step Three: Marketing Planning

In the marketing planning phase, more concrete measurements are made to hone in on specific strategic processes that will be fundamental for the strategy as a whole. Firstly, agencies will want to define their target audience. Which companies will be most interested in your services? What are some of the interests and aesthetics that appeal to these organizations? Answering these questions will lead to the creation of the next part, which is to set measurable goals.^[4]

Measurable goals are similar to the kind of goals discussed in the first step, but will often be shorter term. For instance, a measurable goal might be to generate 100 new organic leads in a given term. The next part of this step is to develop a budget in order to adequately execute these goals. Each goal will require work, and your job here is to allocate such tasks with sufficient resources.

Step Four: Implementation

Here is where, as they say, the pedal hits the metal. Once resources such as budget and work hours are obtained, a schedule for the execution of the plan is drafted. Project managers receive word from executives and/or other planning staff that these processes are to be executed.

Each individual element, with its set of goals and parameters, is scheduled and assigned to respective members of the team. This is often done with project management tools included in an effective Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) system.

Step Five: Evaluation

After the implementation phase is concluded, the same group of executives and managers will want to evaluate the success of the implementation. Once evaluated, the team will be in a position to be another round of the previously listed steps. The strategy is an ongoing endeavor that does require trial and error. The trick is to minimize the errors with each iteration.

Conclusion: Making It or Breaking It

Adhering to details and reflecting on processes is central to whether these processes make or break your agency’s strategy. At every step of the way, it is important to remain vigilant and focused on how vision is implemented in a process and how that process leads to concrete results. Once those results are measured, lessons learned should be re-integrated back into the process as it begins anew. In the end, such a process will help make your agency’s strategy a great success.