Marketing Plan vs. Marketing Strategy

Strategy is not planning

It’s about the principles that guide your decisions, not the decisions themselves.

There is a lot of confusion in the marketing world about what it means to have a marketing strategy.

You can read article after article about how important it is to have a strategy, but very few marketers talk about what strategy is, how to develop it and how to use it to win.

Having a marketing plan does not mean you have a strategy.  

Coordinating your marketing activities is not the same as developing a strategy.  

Assigning tasks is not “doing strategy”.

Strategy is the step before decision making and tactical plans and it should outline the framework and principles that will guide your decision making process as an organisation.

This should be based on a thorough understanding of:

• Where you’re going (what does success look like)

• How you’re going to get these (how you will win within your constraints and against the competition)

• Why are you setting off in the first place (why bother going to all of this effort - what’s the point?)

“Imagine you decide you want to go for a run. You head out the front door, find a good rhythm and before you know it, put several miles between your feet and the house. 

Only thing is you didn’t really have a destination in mind, so you have no idea where you are. It’s also dark and you left the torch at home. And you forgot to put shoes on, so now your feet are blistered. 

That’s how you should think about strategy. You need to know where it is you want to go, create the guiding policy that will help you get there, and equip your company with the tools to execute."

Jason Bradwell

What is a marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy has to fit with your overarching business strategy. In fact, before you even get to the point of “doing” marketing strategy work, you need to ensure that you have a solid business strategy in place.

After all, if you build a marketing strategy around a product or service that customers don’t want, or at a price point that doesn’t generate sufficient profile, you won’t have a business for very long.

Your business strategy should provide direction on the following points, at a minimum:

(Remember strategy is about developing a decision making framework and a guiding set of principles.)

• Your mission and vision - what does an ideal present future look like? Will you be global or local, mass market or niche? Where is the destination?

• Your goals and objectives - what metrics are you pursuing at the expense of other avenues? Are you focused on EBITDA over net profit, utilisation over headcount?

• Your values - what are your dealbreakers? What won’t you do in pursuit of your company objectives?

• The products/services you plan to sell - strip it back to your core offerings, not “we might do this in the future”. It has to be realistic, achievable and capable of supporting your objectives.

• Your competitive advantages - what attributes and capabilities will you nurture across your organisation to ensure you win. E.g. better customer service, ability to reach to market changes, willingness to invest in talent.

Building on the above, your marketing strategy should outline the following

• Customer segmentation and targeting - our of every type of customer you could market to, who should you focus on?

• Pricing - are you going to be premium or budget? Will you discount for volume or longer contracts?

• Positioning - this is tied into everything above, but is also about perception and messaging. As positioning expert April Dunford puts it - “Positioning defines how our product is different and better than alternatives for a particular set of customers”

• Opportunities and threats - this is systematic identification of existing and emerging opportunities and threats that may influence your market and organisation over the next few years. You then need to decide how you’ll hedge against them and what ground you are willing to give up in pursuit of your objectives (most organisations skip the threats part and ignore them until it’s too late)

As a marketing consultant working with companies to develop their marketing strategies, I typically like to run a comprehensive exercise that explores all of the areas above. 

From this exploration, I then help organisations define a broad list of strategic principles. Short and sweet, these points distill the marketing strategy into clearly defined principles that can broadly guide decision making.

For example, one of my own strategic marketing principles for my marketing consultancy is:

• Aligning myself with the industries, companies and people who challenging the status quo to be be the go-to consultant for high-tech companies building a better future

In terms of how this guides decision making, I ask myself “does this activity/tactic/channel align with this strategic principle?”

If yes, I go ahead. If no, I should reconsider.

What is a marketing plan

Have you noticed we haven’t talked about channels, tactics, metrics or content calendars yet? 

That’s because all of these elements should all go into your marketing plan, not your marketing strategy. 

A marketing plan is a tactical or operational plan that covers in detail the actions to be taken within a short term planning period, how these actions will be measured for effectiveness and who will be responsible for ensuring that they take place.

What’s the difference between a marketing plan and marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy defines the “why”, “what” and “who” behind your marketing. 

• What winning looks like

• Why you’re going to win

• Who are you winning for and with

Your marketing plan should outline the “how,” “when,” “where,” and “who”

• How you will measure subset indicators of success (marketing KPIs) that lead to macro indicators of success (business KPIs = winning) - e.g. we need 112 MQLs in Q1 to reach our £20m turnover target

• How you will convey your winning proposition to customers (messaging)

• Where you plan to reach your best fit customers (channels & positioning)

• How you plan organise your marketing activities (campaigns & themes)

• When plan to run marketing campaigns, tactics and activities (time boundaries, cadence & calendar)

• Who will be responsible for each activity and who (the resources - an awful name for people) will be required to ensure the marketing plan is implemented.

• How, where and when budget will be allocated across your chosen channels, tactics and activities

Why you need both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan

Your marketing strategy is focused on being effective - it’s about identifying where you need to focus your efforts and deciding what’s out of scope based on your organisational goals.

Your marketing plan is at its heart a resource allocation plan - it’s focused on conveying your strategy into action in the most efficient way possible.

Companies with an effective strategy but inefficient tactics may not do astoundingly well, but they will survive. 

Those with an ineffective strategy will eventually fail, the question of how quickly will be determined by how efficient their tactics are. 

(Counterintuitively, efficient tactics will often drive faster failure in companies barking up the wrong strategic tree.)

Using Your Marketing Strategy and Plan

Both your marketing strategy and marketing plan should exist as living written documents. 

The living aspect is important, as we must recognise marketing strategies and plans are constantly changing along with the wider market and business contexts.

We shouldn’t be afraid to change our strategy or plan if new information becomes available, or if our assumptions (strategy is after all a well reasoned set of assumptions about the reality in which an organisation operates) are proven incorrect.

As to exactly how often you should be reviewing your strategy and plan, to use a well worn cliche, it really does depend. 

However at a minimum I would advise you review your marketing strategy on a yearly basis and your marketing plan every three months. Typically with clients I work on a quarterly basis when it comes to planning, as this keeps things nimble and adaptive. However we are still grounded by the longer term strategy, so that future focus is not lost.

Using a regularly reviewed and updated marketing strategy and plan, your organisation should:

• Achieve better coordination of marketing activities

• Identify expected developments or changes to the cadence, timing or purpose of your marketing activities

• Increase your organisation’s ability to change with a process that anticipates it

• Reduce conflicts about “where the company is going” and which department is responsible for what 

• Improve wider organisational communication about what marketing is working on and why

• Ensure available resources can be better matched to growth opportunities

• Develop a framework for continuous improvement and review of marketing operations and efficiency

• Take a systematic approach to developing strategy that does not rely on best guesses or the highest paid person’s opinion

Looking for external support to develop or scale your marketing strategy and plan?

Get in touch today for a high level chat about how I could support your organisation in finding its winning formula.

Should you let AI write your content?

“This advert was written by AI”

If you work in the content marketing space, it’s extremely likely you have been bombarded with adverts for AI copywriting tools over the past few months. These tools promise the creation of high-performing marketing copy in seconds and the instant generation of blog posts, social media content and even entire websites.

How does AI copywriting work?

AI copywriting is essentially computer-generated writing created by natural language processing tools. The majority of AI copywriting platforms utilise the OpenAI API which runs models with weights from the GPT-3 family.

Given a text prompt, the AI copywriting tool will generate content by analysing similar preexisting content from around the web, taking these parameters to generate something new and supposedly plagiarism free. (It’s always worth checking their outputs against existing content as they have been known to copy and paste).

Is AI actually any good at writing content real humans want to read?

To put the machines through their paces I let an AI copywriting tool write the following article. I provided the tool with the headings as inputs and asked the tool to give me a paragraph of copy for each.

Should you let AI write your content for you?

To write or not to write? That is the question. For years, people have been writing content for blogs, websites, and businesses. Now, there’s a multitude of artificial intelligence platforms that will do all the writing for you! So should you outsource your content generation to AI content genera- er...creators?

Can AI Replace Human Writers?

As long as there have been humans writing, there have been people who seek to criticize them. The goal of a critic is to find fault with a piece of writing and explain why it's wrong. This is a natural role for a human writer but today, humans are being replaced by computers because it’s cheaper and easier to let machines handle parts of writing tasks such as proofreading. Let’s take a look at why letting AI write your content might be a good idea....

Why Should You Use an AI Copywriting Tool?

Writing content is hard. There’s the writing, the thinking, the researching and the editing and reading all along the way. Most of the work is spent building and improving your skills in each area. That's why we at CopyAI decided it was time to open up our platform to help writers put their best work into the world. Our goal is to help writers get more shares, more traffic, and more sales from the places they already get 40% of their sales from.

What Is AI Copywriting and How Does It Work?

Writing is a skill that can be learned, practiced and practiced. In today’s world of quick-thinking copywriters with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, there’s never been a need to let an AI expert rewrite your content for you — unless you know exactly what you want and need. For this post, we’re going to look at how AI copywriting can help you create content that sells more, attracts more leads, generates more revenue and inspires your readers.

Can AI write meaningful stories?

Some people believe that the answer to the above is yes, that AI can and will write your content for you. Full stop. If you want the best writing possible, if you want to maximize ad spend and minimize efforts, then the answer is yes. This is not something that should be surprising to anyone who has tried doing something online. The truth is that most humans are terrible at

Back to the human wordsmith…

Will the machines replace writers?

Looking at the results above, I think it’s safe to say that AI copywriting tools are not set to replace human writers any time soon.

For a start, the term AI is misplaced. The tools can’t think for themselves and are only as good as the text inputs you give them. A lot of the content they spit out is reductive and often pretty nonsensical, possibly reflecting the wider data set they were trained on.

Human judgement is required to both select the right inputs and judge the outputs.

Very occasionally you do get a nugget that’s worth using, but this more to do with the automation of infinite monkeys than a reliable machine that can spew out Shakespeare on-demand.

What is the use case for automated copywriting then?

As someone who suffers from writer’s block practically every time I sit down at a keyboard, I do think there is a use case for copywriting tools when it comes to generating ideas and refining tricky paragraphs and phrasing.

The tools are actually quite good at reforming and regurgitating sentences, which means they can be used for finding synonyms and alternate phrasing at scale.

Good writing is the result of refining a bad first draft and these tools definitely aid in this, but they can not be relied upon to develop new ideas. The machines can not be decoupled from the human inputs and can not be relied upon to deliver groundbreaking prose or original arguments.

Like with most technology, these tools are still only as good as the user…

A New Chapter & My Next Adventure

Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, the past year has forced me to reassess my priorities, in both life and work.

Far from diminishing my ambitions, 2020/21 strengthened my resolve to think bigger. Widen my impact. Dare courageously. As Marc Andreessen said, it’s time to build.

I have always been driven by the impact I can have - whether that’s on people, companies or industries. 

That's why, after two and a bit amazing years leading Netsells' marketing efforts, I will be stepping down as Marketing Director at the end of May. 

In all honesty, it's a bittersweet moment. I will be leaving behind a company that has given me so many opportunities to grow and a fantastic team who are going from strength to strength. I can’t wait to watch the company continue to grow and thrive.

So what comes next? 

I am founding a Marketing Consultancy to provide strategic marketing support to ambitious technology companies looking to scale.

Developing my own marketing outfit has been an ambition of mine for a long time and I can’t tell you how excited (and let’s be honest, terrified) I am to finally jump out of my comfort zone and strike out on my own. 

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that there is no perfect time to take a risk. There will always be curveballs and unexpected events - the important thing is your ability to stay agile and able to adapt. 

Alongside the “if not now, when?” question, I’m also driven by the fact that our industry is filled with mediocre marketing. Every company looks the same, speaks with the same buzzwords, and utilises the same website layouts. It’s boring for our customers and hardly sparks excitement for our staff or investors. 

What I offer my clients is clarity and creativity. Clarity on their proposition, positioning and ideal customers, coupled with creative approaches to expressing their unique value and reaching the right audiences with messaging that hits the mark. 

My approach to marketing doesn’t consist of one-time hacks or repackaging generic marketing advice. It’s based on years of experience, agile methodologies, rigorous focus on the data and a deep understanding of what it takes to design and execute on marketing strategies that actually generate ROI. 

Initially this will be a solo venture, but my ambition is to tap into the amazing talent we have in Yorkshire. I want to build a business that provides opportunities for young people in the region to break into the world of technology and marketing. 

I’ll be sharing my journey as I work towards this goal, so make sure you check back for updates as I progress (you can also sign-up below to get news directly via email).

The Brave & giving back

Alongside building my consultancy, I’m also excited to continue growing my podcast, newsletter and speaking work.

There’s a lot of hype around the creator economy at the moment and while I’m unlikely to make a full living from my writing or speaking, I’m extremely passionate about sharing positive, inspiring stories and championing the people, initiatives and companies that are building a better future for us all.

(If you would like to get involved as a guest or sponsor, please do get in touch!)

I’m also proud to be continuing my work as a member of City of York’s Skills and Employability Council and help mentor the next generation of marketing leaders as a Women in Tech SEO mentor. 

I’ve always been a big believer in giving back to my industry and wider community. So many people have helped me throughout my career, so it’s only fair I pay it forward. 

Interested in working together?

I’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch on bethan@bethanvincent.com, or contact me here.

Should I be a marketing specialist or generalist?

There are two sides to marketing. You can be a generalist and learn about a variety of disciplines, or you can specialise in one thing and become a vertical expert.

If you're just starting out as a marketer, get your hands on as much knowledge as possible! The more exposure you have to tools and ideas, the better your work will be. You’ll also get a better sense of what you enjoy and don’t enjoy.

As you advance in your career, you’ll increasingly find yourself having to choose between niche or generalist roles. Which path is better? I discuss my thoughts below.

Depth Over Distance

As the fifth industrial revolution rips through rapidly digitising economies, employees are starting to ask valid questions about the skills they will need to survive in the future. 

Debate continues to rage over the merits of becoming a generalist or specialist in your chosen profession. As a self-professed marketing generalist, I have decided to optimise for broad knowledge and flexibility over narrow and deep expertise. 

I do occasionally think to myself, as roles across multiple industries continue to become increasingly niche, is this a wise strategy? Only yesterday I saw a corporate job ad for a TikTok content executive…. 

The Panda Paradox 

Giant pandas are often described as an evolutionary dead-end - lazy bears that struggle to reproduce and subsist on a monoculture diet of bamboo. They are the ultimate specialists, able to thrive in the narrowest of niches where nothing else can, but unable to adapt quickly enough to the dramatic changes the modern world has inflicted on their environment. 

It would be reasonable to argue that evolution leans towards extreme specialisation when environmental conditions are stable. Pandas have existed for roughly 8 million years according to fossil records (compared to Homo Sapiens measly 200,000 years). As a species, they have been pretty successful by most measures.

However, a further twist in the tale comes from recent evidence that suggests their bamboo-only preferences are only 7,000 or so years old. Their specialisation is speculated to be a result of human encroachment on their environment. It is a response to volatility, an emergency mechanism of survival in adverse conditions when the competition is fierce.

To pull this thread back out to the labour market, it’s arguable that specialisation is a decent defence against increasing competition. If a distinct skill set is in demand and supply is short, becoming highly skilled in that area will generally correlate to higher salaries and better working terms. 

The Ultimate Generalists

Some of the most “successful” animals (if you define success as the longevity of a certain structural form) are the ultimate generalists. 

Sharks have existed for 450 million years and can still be found in most habitats across the globe. Crocodiles too have been around for a cool 250 million years. Both types of animal have survived extinction-level events alongside multiple periods of global cooling and warming. They are the ultimate survivors.

What’s the secret to their success? One answer lies in the fact they are dietary generalists - they eat a wide variety of food and are therefore more survive if certain food sources disappear. 

While they are not highly-adapted to each ecosystem and can not exploit it to the fullest degree, they can jump across to another biome much more easily than the specialist.

The trade-off

Choosing to be a generalist means you are optimising for volatility, which seems like a good bet in the current world. 

You are less likely to see the upside of highly competitive environments, however, you will be more able to pivot and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. 

Specialists have the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the full potential of a niche, which is great when times are good and conditions are stable. This comes at a cost, though, as they are vulnerable to change and are generally unable to adapt quickly, risking the disappearance of their niche entirely, and extinction…

How to write the perfect B2B cold sales email

90% Of The Cold Outreach Messages I Receive Are Terrible

Like many people I’m constantly bombarded by cold sales messages via LinkedIn and email. Most of them fall into the trap of being a combination of the following:

• Too long

• Not clear on what they are asking me to do

• Not clear on what their company actually does

• Expect me to commit to a time intensive next step

• Poorly written

• Not relevant (to me or my company)

Needless to say, I am very unlikely to engage.

My Cold Outreach Approach

This is how I approach potential guests for my podcast on LinkedIn. I also adapt the message slightly to use it on Twitter and other platforms, usually just by changing the CTA. My goal is to convey clearly my value and what I want from them in the shortest message possible.

It’s also important to note, this is also sent to a carefully selected list of people, as opposed to a blanket outreach campaign. It’s just as important to put time and effort into working out who you are messaging, alongside the message itself.

Hi X,

My podcast The Brave explores resilience and adaptability in the 21st century.

We have released over 30 episodes with over 3000 downloads and have a growing audience which includes global creative and tech professionals.

I’d love discuss having you as a guest on an episode, could we connect?

It currently has a 70% success rate (success = accepting the connection request which allows me to send them through more information)

Breakdown: Why does it work?

Hi [X],

I’m not a huge fan of hugely formalised openings, but just use your common sense here, if they would be more responsive to “dear” due to the position or age consider using it. I’d much rather save the characters and make the message appear as short as possible.

Also please never ever use “greetings of the day” — if I read this I immediately delete something.

[My podcast The Brave explores resilience and adaptability in the 21st century.]

Set the scene and give them context in one sentence. Avoid superfluous details and keep it to the absolute essentials.

[We have released over 30 episodes with over 3000 downloads and have a growing audience which includes global creative and tech professionals.]

This is where you want to establish both your own credibility and the value you can offer. Statistics are an especially powerful way of displaying credibility (ratings, downloads, users etc.).

[I’d love discuss having you as a guest on an episode],

This is your ask. You need to make it 100% clear what you’re expecting from a continued conversation.

Please note “My company provides X services, I’d love to take 5 minutes of your time to discuss how we can help you” is extremely vague.

People don’t have 5 minutes to find out how you’re going to help them. They want to know immediately the problem you solve and the value they bring.

[could we connect]?

This is your CTA. Make it clear how they can indicate their interest and give you permission to follow on the conversation.

Ideally your ask shouldn’t be too onerous on the other person, for example I’m much more likely to agree to be sent some info via email than agree to a 15 minute call.

Respect their time and attention. Remember, most people you’re trying to contact will be extremely busy and any message which looks time intensive to figure out and/or respond to will likely get ignored.

Following Up

How many times should you follow up a cold outreach email? It depends.

My personal preference is to send a single one line follow up a couple of days after my first message.

If they don’t show any desire to continue the conversation after that, I generally leave things for at least a month and then send a final message.