Marketing Execution > Marketing Strategy

Marketing departments get a lot of advice and ideas. Right from conducting webinars to employee branding, everyone has a piece of advice for us.

I remember organizing a hiring event. I oversaw the whole thing, right from setting up a booth to making sure that social media posts go on time, working on content for the brochures, and coordinating with designers for the designs. Scheduling our representatives at the event and coordinating with the PR agency so that we have the right media coverage. While running and managing all these, a gentleman had some advice for me – ‘Our booth doesn’t have cookies or chocolates, can we have something for the next day?"

What I pity is that none of these advice-givers try to understand that real marketing is not about ideas but execution. While I would not go into detail about my reaction, it’s very important to understand that the basic strategies remain the same, but the execution time and process make all the difference.

Just as an example – It’s easy to say let’s do a webinar series and we have everything in-house. We have so much expertise in XYZ technology, and we have several clients that vouch for our excellence in delivery.

Now let’s explore the execution side of things – For a webinar series, we need to line up at least 3 to 5 practitioners with the designated topics and timelines.

To drive traffic, we need to create landing pages, emails, and visual assets so that people can sign up for the webinar.

There are some pre-event activities like sending reminders and emails and post-event activities that require sending the recorded webinars and thanking the attendees for sign-up and attendance. Now from a surface, no one understands that it requires very tight collaboration between the marketing team as well as the practitioners involved.

The Point – In Marketing, Execution is always more important than Strategy.

Here are a few tips that can ensure that your Marketing Execution is successful.

Tips for Making Execution Successful

1. Always over-plan and have a sense of urgency

I always prefer running ahead of schedule. If you will plan around 5 pre-event and 10 post-event emailers, you will be sending half of them. So, it’s always preferable to have a backup and over-plan things.

While having a sense of urgency seems a little negative connotation, it’s important to stay ahead of the schedule. Right from your creative to content, there are multiple level reviews and changes that happen, so create a buffer time for everyone. I usually prepare a mental map of things to be done for any marketing activity and try to tick them off from my task list.

2. Preparing a Plan for Marketing Execution

Think about all the activities, team members, skillsets, help outside the team, and budget approvals required in the whole execution process. Prepare a list of items that you will be doing in the process of executing the Marketing Strategy. For instance, organizing a Roundtable Conference.

You will need a list of probable guests, topics, finalizing the venue, giveaways, literature about the company or product, social media promotions, invite content and designs, and more. Include these activities in your plan and assign a target date to finish these tasks.

Once you are ready with your plan, run it among your seniors or peers and see if they want to add or delete anything. I found this step extremely helpful because that’s how you have people who are aware of your ideas and a summary of the execution plan. If at any place, you would need help, you don’t have to brief them all over again. 

3. Involve People from Beginning

Don’t try to play hide and seek games with your team members. Nothing is more awful than giving them half-baked items and hiding things from people who are going to get involved at later stages.

Marketing teams are usually either firefighting or catering to last-minute requirements. Once you are ready with the plan, reach out to different team members for whom you would need support. These team members can range from Content Marketers to Graphics teams or Website Developers.

List down the deliverables from everyone and indicate a rough timeline to submit the same. Any successful marketing strategy execution is a result of an extremely collaborative and agile team. Prepare your team to fill in each other’s shoes and help other team members based on the bandwidth they have. 

4. Make Multi-Tasking a Habit

If you are in the execution seat, you cannot escape multi-tasking so it's better to make it a habit. While multi-tasking is often claimed to curb productivity, it doesn’t seem so. If you plan and divide your work as per the time frame and are right with your priority list, multi-tasking is a wonderful skill.

For C-suite who doesn’t know what operational challenges your team must be facing, it’s important to work closely with your team members. Understand the smallest of challenges they face, give them sufficient resources and help them to be successful in their role.

Trust me, it happens with every marketing event that you try to upload a file to send to the printer and it’s not just going through, or the format is not working, or colors get changed. Be prepared to handle these things.

5. If things go wrong, Be Prepared!

Even with 100 percent preparation, things can go wrong on the day of the event or just before launching the campaign. Just be prepared mentally to take charge and progress with whatever activities are left.

Winning Marketing Execution

To win the game of marketing execution, it’s important to work closely with your team members and delegate work. But more than this, it’s important to run the nuances of these marketing strategies with management. You might face some issues for the first few things but then management will start understanding that simply putting ideas on the table doesn’t work, you need to give the team ample time, trust them, and help them whenever they are stuck to progress in the marketing strategies.