The Ultimate Marketing Strategy Course

One of the most important strategic decisions you can make is defining your company vision. It clarifies how you and your managers will lead, what your company's focus is on, and how to develop your culture. It defines how employees will make decisions when you are not around, what you aspire to be, and ultimately define what success looks like. We'll go through the steps to define your company vision so you can create a clear picture of what your company is about, where it's going, and how it will get there.

Milestones are the high-level strategic tasks your organization needs to make in order to fulfill it's medium and long-term goals. This might be key hires, developing a certain product or service or something even bigger like an acquisition. Milestones are important because they guide the day to day activities of some of your most important leaders. It helps them prioritize their time and resources to what are the most important milestones to make the organization a success.

Key performance indicators, also known as KPI's, are the most important goals for an organization. KPI's are S.M.A.R.T, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Typically you assign individual owners to KPIs to set expectations and be transparent about desired outcomes. We'll go through examples of how to set KPI's for your organization and individual and how to measure those over time.

One of the most important items an organization can do is clearly define who their customer is. Understanding customer behaviors, demographics, where they congregate, and the intimate parts of their life will help you get into the mind of your customer when making key decisions. If you don't know who you are targeting, it becomes much more difficult to market and grow your business because your messaging and all related materials will not resonate with your end-user.

Every persona goes through a unique set of steps to becoming a customer. They might interact with a blog post or a social advertisement, sign up for an account before ultimately browsing your product offering and making a purchase. Each journey is unique, and it requires a high-level understanding of what activities you will have to take in order to make this journey a positive reality. Journey's look at everything your organization is doing, gets your employees on the same page, and points everything and everyone into a cohesive direction.

No matter what you're doing there will be competition. Direct, indirect, alternative solutions. They all exist and in some form represent competition. This isn't a bad thing. It gives you a perspective about what success looks like and how to get better. Observing the competition's messaging, product, and service offerings and how they are succeeding will make you a better company.

There are 20+ known growth distribution channels. How do you know which ones are right for your business? Each channel takes time and money to get up and running correctly, resources that are scarce enough at it is. We'll go through the top growth channels and how to prioritize the channels for maximum impact no matter your business model.

We need a way to sync our strategy to our day to day implementation. We need a process for identifying what to work on based on our strategic goals. We need an initiative management system, something that helps us organize and collaborate on the most important initiatives.

You need to understand if work put in is yielding the results you're searching for. Depending on your individual and organizational goals, you can track certain data points for specific KPIs. You can't improve what you aren't tracking, so we'll go through examples about how to set up a KPI goal tracking system to ensure your organization hit's its goals.

There are two types of data, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data is the individual data for a KPI, the number of appointments, total contacts, revenue growth, but equally important is qualitative data, which provides context to the quantitative data. Identifying results, learnings and action items for individual initiatives allows you to provide this context and improve your execution of initiatives towards strategic goals over time.

Thanks for taking the course! I hope you enjoyed it!