Strategy Skills Accelerator Workshop

We know from our own experience that in-house marketers and agencies are so often caught in the weeds of execution and day to day pressures to get tasks done that they haven’t developed the skills to have the more important, strategic conversations with their business leaders or clients.

But in order to do this they need to make the shift to a completely different, more strategic set of conversations using the language of the business or client stakeholder, the language of growth.

Moving from channels and execution to customer acquisition, return on investment, the allocation of resources and budget, longer term growth planning with proper objectives and KPIs that are feeding into those.

Making this step up a level involves understanding these three key marketing concepts:

1. Competitive advantage – you need to know what your competitive context is in order to know how to win. Those who bring depth of understanding to their clients or businesses will win out.
2. Marketing maturity – there are two aspects to this, firstly the business. Is it a start-up or established business? The second is client-side marketing. Is it 1 person or a full CMO led team? Understanding where a business is on these scales determines your approach and recommendations..
3. Rule of 95-5 – which is that 95% of your target is out of market at any given time, only 5% is. For example if you’re going all in on direct response for the 5% that means you’re not building affinity with the 95% who are not YET in market. So striking the balance between brand and sales activity is key.

To support agencies and marketers in developing these skills and the ability to step up the conversations they’re having, we’ve created a 10-week training programme, Strategy Catalyst Training.

And for our Leeds Digital Festival event we will be focusing on the first of the three concepts – competitive advantage – in a virtual hands-on ‘Strategy Accelerator Workshop’.

The workshop will give attendees the skills needed to articulate in real depth how competitive advantage can help their businesses and clients succeed. It’s a strategic play: being able to tell your business leader or client something of value demonstrates your wider expertise and an informed view of the business problems, as well as proactive, strategic thinking.

Attendees will learn how to map out your or your clients’ customers, their needs and motivations, as well as the business’s capability, strengths and weaknesses and where that triangulates with competitors and what they are offering in the market, showing where they can win.

Ultimately this puts marketers and agencies on a powerful footing to build strong relationships based on trust and confidence that you know and understand the business or client context. This in turn leads to confidence that recommendations are given with the understanding of this context.

Workshop:

An interactive, hands-on session where participants work through real-world case studies, breakout and guided exercises. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks and confidence to embed this key aspect of strategic marketing thinking in their agencies or businesses.

Agenda:

Introduction: 5-10mins – Set up and introduction

Session: 15mins – Marketing strategy and how it drives growth, focused on how to create competitive advantage using frameworks and practical techniques

Break out groups: 10mins – Applying frameworks to your live business challenges

Review: 10mins – Review break out group work

Q&A: 10mins – Opportunity to ask specific questions