Let’s debunk the myth that a marketing strategy is big, slow, and static.

Remember when we said ‘map your marketing strategy’ using the five Ds of navigation? What this analogy highlights is that your strategy is a route plan to get to where you want to go. But the point of having a plan is not to enforce rigidity no matter what, it’s to provide a pathway that is considered, thorough, and fit-for-purpose given the information you have at the time.

If the weather forecast changes, it might make sense to adapt your original route. If you are recommended a great place to stop for lunch that is off the path, you should go and enjoy it. And if there is a medical emergency which requires you to return to civilisation, you should probably abandon the walk altogether. The point is that if your macro forces change, or you get offered a great investment opportunity, or your business faces a crisis, or any other scenario occurs which throws a curveball at your plans, it’s OK to revisit and tweak your strategy.

With that in mind, mapping your marketing strategy shouldn’t feel like too big a job or too slow a process, and the resulting plan shouldn’t feel too static. Keep your strategy simple from the start, know that it’s OK to deviate for the right reasons, but have a document to refer to when you’re unsure of which way to turn next.

Let’s consider the benefits of getting started today without a strategy.

Sitting in the ‘pro strategy’ camp, it’s easy to forget the benefits of getting started without one, but many do exist. Firstly, you can use your marketing activities as a form of research to find, define, and understand your target audience. Test your content on different social media platforms to see where your audience hangs out, before investing too much time on the wrong one. Use email marketing to refine how you position and promote your different solutions before investing in a website. Research the key topics that journalists in your industry are looking for to inform your own long-form content.

Secondly, once you get started, you can test-and-learn as you go. You’ve probably heard the saying ‘progress over perfection’ and it’s extremely relevant in marketing. Create one piece of content that you can easily reformat it into multiple versions of the same narrative. Take a blog post and turn it into a video, a carousel, an email, a story, a webinar, an advert, or something else. Test, test, test, until you know what your prospects enjoy but more importantly, what converts your prospects into clients. Learn which formats result in engagement and which result in enquiries.

With benefits like these, it makes sense to get started today, as long as you’re exploring multiple channels, testing different formats, and learning about your audience along the way. The risk of having this short-term mentality without any long-term plan is that you’ll fall into the trap of creating more and more, feeling like you have to do everything, meanwhile not really knowing what works or why you’re doing it.

So, let us introduce you to a world where you can start (to strategise) today!

By starting to strategise today, you can enjoy the best of both worlds – putting your business in front of real people to see which marketing activities and channels work well, whilst feeding into a long-term plan for the future. If something doesn’t work, it’s probably a good idea to ditch it, whilst the tactics that do work could inform part of your strategic planning. Of course, you can also build experimentation and testing into your strategy anyway, by leaving a little budget aside for new opportunities or previously untested channels, on top of your (now) tried-and-tested marketing mix.

If in doubt, remember that starting and strategising are not counterintuitive. You can get started and get strategising today!