I sometimes wonder if coming up with a strategy is the easiest part of building a digital marketing plan. Get some smart people in a room, throw out some ideas, put down the best in a nice presentation and then boom you have an award winning strategy plan everyone fawns over. But, does a good strategy mean success? Of course not.
Don’t get me wrong, the strategy piece is extremely important but what about the rest? What about the execution? The reporting? The analysis? The optimization? Strategy only goes as far as the piece of paper it is written on – the rest determines the actual success or failure of a project.
I want to see more people focusing on the full-cycle of a digital marketing plan – start with the strategy, but then what..now what? How do we measure? How do we improve? A digital marketing plan should be ever-changing and evolving.
Am I wrong?
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Spot on! My favorite parts of the plan are execution and optimization. Anyone can strategize, few can implement and turn it in to something worthwhile. At the end of the day, big ideas are just ideas until they come to fruition.
Correct – I have a sound strategy for my own efforts, however putting everything in place is much harder than it appears on paper
I love the thought. It reminds me of ‘strategy meetings’ for campaigns that ended up flopping. While I enjoy your rant against those who ignore the full-cycle, I think it’d be great if you presented some sort of plan or guide for the next steps. I could use a resource like that while meeting with clients. Thanks for the post! It has been a while :)