At Fire NBM, we’ve always been about helping clients grow their businesses, particularly with tech enabled marketing. From mature businesses to start ups. They are now increasingly asking us to provide more strategic support, as they address new commercial challenges, in addition to our martech services.
So, if we include ‘Strategy’ on our website as one of our solutions, what do we mean? And, more importantly, what do our clients mean when they are looking for more strategic support?
Taking a step back or up from Strategy, it’s important that a company or brand has a clearly defined ‘What’. What are you looking to achieve if and when seeking strategic support (best when phrased in straightforward, concise language and with a clearly measurable outcome)?
Once the ‘What’ is defined and agreed, the Strategy is the ‘How’. How are we going to achieve the objectives? Initially at quite a high level, this means the overall approach and then down into the planning and tactics.
Strategy means a lot of different things to different people. Clarity and consensus at the outset of ‘strategy development’ work is vital. We have our own one line definitions for important elements of the process, deliberately concise and free of jargon, such as with proposition and positioning.
· Proposition – ‘what can you (‘provider’) do for me (target audience)?’
· Positioning – ‘what is distinctive about you (‘provider’)?’ (and definitely not about USP!)
But it’s important not to get bogged down in terminology, when what is needed for strategy is creating an agreed way forward which is meaningful and actionable, and, when executed well, will have a positive impact on your business.
We’ve talked about Strategy on the Fire NBM website by illustrating some of the aspects that strategy work can cover
‘We’ll help you define and prioritise customer segments for growth marketing activities and create differentiation strategies based on price, products, services, channels and other factors’
This is deliberately broad brush because our clients may well have a variety of strategic issues they want to discuss.
When Mitsubishi Heavy Industries approached Fire NBM, they were looking to launch a new generation of heat pump products, with the clear objective of achieving a strong initial level of distribution, as the basis for a roll out once the products were established. We co-created a strategy focused on identifying UK demand hot-spots for the heat pumps, and then, using online needs analyses, developed the routes to market coupled with tailored propositions and messaging, culminating in an SEO programme and delivering strong lead generation.
The challenge for The Royal Parks was very different, how best to offset a continuing reduction in government grant funding, in an appropriately sensitive way reflecting the nature and tradition of the parks? The strategy, in this instance, was all about the brand and communications, bringing together the diverse views and interests of many different stakeholder groups.
Fire NBM has a well tried and trusted approach to working with our clients on strategy development but it’s not one size fits all.
We can help with your growth challenges and opportunities, and the optimal strategy may well be a good start point. If you’d like a chat - do get in touch via the form below.
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