Social Media Marketing Why is it so hard to follow "A Strategy"?
Over the years, I’ve noticed the subject of ‘strategy’ appears to raise more questions than answers with accounts. It’s not the ‘need’ for strategy; everyone agrees a sound strategy is invaluable and key to a company’s success.
The question becomes, “Why do some companies and businesses seem to develop, follow and execute an effective business strategy while other seemingly similar companies fail?”
While strategy itself can be defined in many ways, poor execution tends to revolve around three areas: Lack of leadership commitment; Poor internal communication; Absence of an organizational monitoring process.
Leadership Commitment - Determining a strategy requires discipline to develop an appropriate and effective plan. Courage and commitment are required when faced with inevitable market and business distractions. If management directs resources away from the original strategy, the long-term focus can become compromised.
While any business must react to market changes, sacrificing long-term vision for short-term gain can impede goal performance. Before embracing new ventures, understand the impact to the long-term strategy no matter how tantalizing the new opportunity appears.
Internal Communication - If not clearly communicated, changes to a strategy can cause staff and employees to question the original plan. They see past efforts cast aside and become suspicious of future plans. Historically, change is driven by market shifts, competitive activity, new technology, regulatory/legal impact or end-user trends. Before making any strategy changes, be sure the reasons aren’t reactionary but ones that are truly justified.
Likewise, employees should not overreact to subtle plan modifications. Any plan requires tweaking, adjustments and subtle course corrections. The key is to effectively communicate changes at all organizational levels.
Organized Monitoring Process - Businesses invest significant time and resources in developing a strategy but fail to monitor plan performance. Without timely reviews, a plan grows stale. Focusing on a new opportunity may make sense, however the impact to the original plan should be reviewed before taking action.
Assess the urgency of the new opportunity. Likewise, a strategy that's revised too often and tinkered with too excess becomes diluted, fragmented and ineffective.
When addressing changes to a strategy, be sure to review these areas below to properly assess the change, communicate it effectively and have a process in place to monitor results:
1. Evaluate the Impact ─ A new opportunity is always exciting! Be sure to measure it against the original plan strategy in ‘dollars and time’. Will existing resources be re-assigned? Are new resources available? How will it affect existing projects and customer commitments? If too complex, consider adding it to next year’s plan or when incremental resources are available.
Take the necessary steps to evaluate and predict the impact. Don’t invite a ‘Trojan Horse’ into your current strategy only to regret it later...
2. Communicate Effectively ─ Ensure all functional areas are informed. Include key department heads in the early stages of development. Reach out to employees using newsletters, direct mail, work place signage, web site postings, e-mail campaigns, pay stub statements and staff meetings. Obviously, a “proposed merger” needs some degree of secrecy but knowing the company is looking at “combining strengths with a new partner who can contribute to sales and market growth” will earn employee appreciation and confidence.
Thorough discussions may help uncover and identify issues that otherwise may go unknown. An informed workforce now ─ is a more productive workforce later...
3. Monitor and Measure ─ Reviewing the strategic plan often is beneficial to identify early where a plan may be off target. While it’s rare for a plan to achieve all stated goals, knowing where the ‘misses’ occurred are just as important. Use formal tracking tools like bowling charts, dashboard reports and other data reporting techniques to help decipher monthly business performance and compare against last year and current plan objectives.
Discovering root causes early can alleviate more catastrophic results if corrective action steps are taken before problems escalate. If it can’t be measured – it can’t be improved...
‘Strategy’ serves as a road map to achieving identified goals. Travel without one and chances are you may still get where you’re going î º but you’ll waste a lot of time, use a lot of gas, and likely make some wrong turns along the way.
When not immersing himself in strategy and branding “black holes”, Matt Klein can be found working on marketing strategy, brand development , account planning and new business efforts at Cross + Associates in Raleigh, NC.
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/moparman
E-mail: mklein@cross-a.com
Twitter: @lamadogg
Community Contributors - Social Media Marketing
