How to translate your business goals into marketing strategy

At Samuraj, we face a daily need from our customers to only produce content, but also to prioritize and plan various communication efforts in order to create maximum value from the available resources.

To do this effectively, our experience is that there must be a clear marketing strategy, which is well anchored both internally within the company as well as externally with external communication partners. This strategy is critical, as it links business with communication, sales with marketing, and ultimately the biggest and most fundamental decisions at board meetings with the final tweak to the smallest design element on the simplest post on LinkedIn.

Business goals

When we we reach deep enough in our reasoning about our communications efforts, asking why we prioritize or perform an effort in a certain way, we eventually come to the question of what contributes best to a company's business goals.

Therefore we need to understand those goals well, ideally both in the short and long term. Do you have a specific revenue growth target? A certain amount of new employees you need to find? Do you need to change the business in some way, with new business areas, products or services?

In order to move on and figure out how communication can create value for you, we first need to understand what you want to achieve.

Business strategy

Based on your business goals you probably have a more or less extensive business strategy, which describes what you consider to be the best way to reach your goals. A common understanding and consensus about the business strategy will result in a certain understanding of your company’s challenges and possibilities as well as certain decisions, a certain business development and even specific activities, all of which can both inspire and be strengthened by communication efforts.

When we have achieved a common understanding of the company's business goals and business strategy, we have a good base on which to reason together about the possibilities of communication to contribute to the achievement of your goals.

Marketing goals and marketing strategy

Formulating the communication strategy does not initially have to involve very complex reasoning – rather the opposite, we believe.

If the goal is, for example, to grow with 30 new highly qualified employees over the next three years in a region with high competition for the workforce, then our communication goal can be formulated in the simplest form as "Our communication needs to facilitate our recruitment in region X during period Y".

It can sound almost too simple, but at the same time it’s easy to validate: If a communication effort generates the greatest possible value among all possible efforts to achieve that goal, then it is a good investment. And when we compile our communication goals, we get a clear overview of which areas we need to focus on and how to prioritize our resources between them.

Next we can start to reason about what a future ideal situation would be like, and what the reality is today in comparison. How would the market ideally perceives us? What do we need to convey for good understanding of our offering? Which values, characteristics or benefits need to be clear, and for whom? By asking and answering similar questions, we create a first understanding of the value communication can and needs to create in order for us to reach the company's goals, and both challenges and opportunities emerge more and more clearly.

When the current state and goal picture descriptions are in place, it becomes easy to see both what value communication efforts can create, and also to start reasoning more specifically about what efforts could feasibly move us from the current situation to goal fulfillment.

If we can manage to summarize this in a unified document, and make an honest, clear evaluation of goals, opportunities and obstacles, then we have done the most important and most difficult work for a communication strategy.

Sure, now we can send it to the marketing department and just cross our fingers that down the road it magically transforms into the ideal activities. But it would probably be better if we understood and could also shape the path from communication strategy to individual activities a little better. We will tell you more about how we do it, via a marketing plan and the generation, planning and prioritization of activities, in our next article.

Do you want to know more right now? Get in touch and book a meeting with us directly.