Intro
Richard P. Rumelt published a book in 2011 called ‘Good Strategy vs Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters’. This blog post is inspired by that book. Here I will reflect on the evolution of my own approach to developing digital marketing strategies and draw attention to the good vs bad elements.
My experience as a Strategist
In 2017, I was promoted to play the role of a Digital Marketing Strategist at a digital marketing agency in Vancouver, where I continued to work on that role till 2023.
During that time, we kept trying to fine tune our approach to create, document, and communicate strategy. At Clear Growth Plans, I am continuing to work on improving this process.
Back at my job, we used the concept of 90-day plans to guide the development of strategy. Every 90-days, we followed certain protocols to gather analysis, reports, evaluations, insights, trends, ideas, and feedback to help us create the next 90-day plan. These plans were first drafted on documents and then organized for execution on our project management software.
The evolution of my abilities to think like a Strategist
During my first few years as a Strategist, the detailing out of the action plan with clear to-do lists used to be the entire focus of creating the 90-day plans. On several occasions, our agency owner told me that I was too focused on the ground floor level tactical elements and that I need to climb to a higher ground to think as a Strategist. It took a while before I began to comprehend what he was suggesting.
At a more practical level, one of my former managers, Andrea, had a more immediate and profound influence on my perspective. She started discussing the 90-day plans I drafted with a simple question for every action item - ‘how will this action help us in achieving the goals’. As an amateur, my immature approach was narrowly focused on creating task oriented plans as I thought that clients were paying us to work. However, working with Andrea helped me differentiate between strategic action plans as opposed to busy plans.
The Good Strategy framework
With greater exposure and experience, my approach continues to evolve. Now I believe that a good strategy simply needs to address 4 key questions -
- What is our current state? [Benchmarks]
- What is our desired state? [Goals]
- How will we reach our desired state? [Actions]
- What makes our action plan effective? [Assessment]
Conclusion
While it's great to simplify things, it's important to understand that there are plenty of other concepts that should be applied to create a good strategy. Some examples of such concepts include Assessment Plans, Delegation, Contingency Planning, and Risk Mitigation.
The process of creating strategies is a whole different subject on its own. It requires a Strategist to decide the steps and protocols to gather analysis, reports, evaluations, insights, trends, ideas, and feedback to help create effective strategic plans.
And still, quite simply, the essence of a good strategy is that it should clearly articulate the current reality, the aspirations, and the plan for achieving the desired results.
Bad Strategy Examples
A bad strategy is one that has one or more essentials of a good strategy missing. For example, my task oriented action plans full of busy work were bad strategies as they often missed articulating the correlation between the tasks and the desired results. Corporate leaders hyping up their team with aspirational statements like becoming the best in the industry and calling this their strategy without articulating clear action plans is another example of bad strategy that is, apparently, quite commonly observed.
Call to Action
At Clear Growth Plans, we are proud and passionate about our approach to strategy. Our processes are constantly improving while our intent remains the same - to provide the best growth hacking, performance marketing, and digital strategy solutions to impact driven small businesses. Give us a shout out if you are leading an impact focused organization interested in exploring the most effective strategies to grow your business.
