Marketing Strategy
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
– Sun-Tzu, El Arte de la Guerra
Strategy may seem like an intimidating concept at first, but I've come to realize that it's really just about problem-solving. Personally, I find great joy in unraveling complex problems and distilling them into simple, logical solutions. Strategy work can get complicated, so it helps to have a framework, and when I don't have one, I create one!
Buyer Personas
My teams have developed numerous Buyer Personas over the years, but the ones created for Proscia, an AI-powered pathology SaaS company, holds a special place in my heart. Proscia's buyers face very specific and unique challenges, that ultimately comes down to saving lives.
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When creating these personas, we adopted a storytelling approach to truly immerse ourselves in the hearts and minds of the buyers. After all, buyers are real people, even if the personas themselves are not. By visualizing the same person in different scenes and interactions throughout their workday, we aimed to bring their experiences to life, understanding their motivations, pain points, and aspirations.
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I've discovered that creative professionals find great value in using personas when brainstorming ideas, developing content, and designing solutions for our clients. That's why I strongly encourage every brand to have comprehensive and accurate persona documents. When organizations share these documents with their internal teams and their agencies, it fosters a deeper understanding of the target audience and ensures alignment across all stakeholders.
Buyer Journeys
I've led strategy workshops to walk through an organization's customer purchase journeys. The Buyer Journey document outlines the stages and touch points a customer goes through during their purchase decision. It also highlights what motivates the buyer to take the next step, or what inhibits them from moving forward.
This document provides a roadmap for teams to understand and address the needs, motivations, and challenges for each target audience at each stage of the buying process. It's also a great way to see if an organization's brand is showing up and offering the right content to support each stage of the journey.
Marketing Plan on a Page
The Plan on a Page (POAP) is a concise document that streamlines marketing activities, fosters alignment, and optimizes resource allocation. This one-page plan summarizes SMART goals, strategic initiatives, tactical activities, and KPIs, providing a clear focus for the marketing team. Collaborative working sessions allow us to tailor the plan to meet our clients' specific needs, empowering them with a unified roadmap for success.
The framework is flexible and adaptable for all types of marketing organizations. Whether it's for campaigns, quarterly or annual planning, or internal team goals, the POAP can be easily customized. I developed this user-friendly version based on my learnings from a brand course at Northwestern Kellogg, enhancing it with a KPIs column for metrics. In fact, at StudioNorth each of our agency's practice areas utilizes this framework to outline their team's goals for the year.
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I've had the privilege of sharing this framework with various marketing groups this year. Through events organized by the American Marketing Association, Chicago, I've taught this methodology to members of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce Small Business Development Committee. And, I led a half-day Marketing Immersive workshop at Edelman, providing valuable insights for marketing professionals. I've included the PDF of my presentation from that event below.
Campaign Journeys
Marketers recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach rarely succeeds when implementing campaigns for target audiences. Once goals, strategies, and tactics are defined, they can be documented to visualize how the audience will engage with the campaign. This process ensures a clear and effective next step to guide individuals through the journey, while also identifying potential gaps or dead ends that allow for refinement and improvement.
Mapping the campaign flow not only provides a strategic guide but also helps align marketing budgets. By understanding each of the steps, marketers can make informed decisions about budget allocation to maximize impact. In addition, the campaign flow serves as a foundation for developing the content strategy, ensuring that messaging is both relevant and engaging for the target audience.
Organizations have consistently valued these maps, often sharing with their own leadership teams and stakeholders—including sales—so that everyone gains a clearer understanding of how marketing is engaging customers.