Business strategy - Marketing strategy consultant

How to get the best results from your digital marketing agency

(This month’s blog comes from our colleague, Charlotte who ran her own business and engaged marketing agencies prior to working with STO Consulting). I am in the fortunate position, having owned my own business for 3 years prior to being in marketing consulting, that I have been a customer of several digital marketing agencies. So I fully understand what the experience is like from the client’s point of view. The expectations, the optimism, and the feeling of being in safe hands when you are promised business growth and you start planning for a more affluent future.

The trial and error approach to business

There is a lot of emphasis on start-up and growth of business currently as a way of stimulating economic growth.

Inevitably there are a number of different approaches being promoted, to enable such business activity to thrive.

A variety of approaches is necessary because of course each business is different. As with many things though, it can be tempting to seek easy answers and shortcuts, but they are unlikely to provide value.

Does your business have more than one strategy?

A strategy is often, wrongly, defined as if it is nothing more than a plan, or worse, a technique.

In fact, it is the thing that determines how a business will create value over the long term. It is also what unites all of the different individuals within a business to be pulling in the same direction (as in Drucker’s ‘Management by Objectives’ – coined in 1954 and still hugely relevant today). Staff recruited into an organisation need to be well informed on what the business is about, what its objectives are, how and why they are relevant to the individuals.

How is ‘Marketing Strategy’ related to Business Strategy?

I’ve had many conversations with people about marketing. Many of these involve people assuming that the product, target market and what customers want are already fixed.

But why should this be the case? Is ‘Product’ not a flexible element of the marketing mix?

Many companies begin with excellence in R&D or with a new concept, or, with an interest that the business founder wishes to make into a commercial venture.