Marketing Strategy Sprint

• Develop a campaign or marketing strategy from scratch.
• Approach marketing goals with a lean mindset and discover quick to implement, achievable solutions to your challenges.
• Instill an agile, solution-based mindset in your marketing team for future projects.
• Help articulate the role and value of marketing to organizational decision-makers.

Who should participate?

This is an ideal exercise for marketing teams. The optimal group size is 3–7 people. Someone from the business side and management board should be included. It can be the director/VP of the business area you are going to cover or in smaller companies the CEO, but it is crucial to have buy-in from the top. As a marketer, there is also the hidden agenda to give decision-makers a better understanding of the role of marketing. This is a perfect way to provide insight into what you do and are trying to achieve.

If the marketing & comms team isn’t big enough, just bring in bodies who are relevant to the topic/business. You need to understand your customer and business to get this to work so sales gals, customer success guys and other people working with the clients are your best bets.

You can do anything from campaign creation to overall marketing strategies. You just adjust your scope accordingly. I recommend starting with something specific like a campaign or a plan to target one audience. Then you can start combining the data into larger entities.

The whole canvas takes a workday to fill out. When you are working on campaigns or the same segment/product, it’ll take you two hours.

Obviously some problems are larger then others and you may need more time on solving them. That’s why you are the big marketing hotshot or the future unicorn CEO: you are able to use your own judgement on time allocation.

If you are starting your marketing, re-branding, doing a product launch, expanding to a new market etc., you’ll be spending a couple of days defining the cornerstones of your marketing.

People: a facilitator (You?), a marketing team, a decision-maker. Bodies are optional.

Other stuff: Whiteboard/wall space, tons of Post-it notes, Sharpies, sticky dots, a time timer, good coffee, a lot of water, some snacks, energy & enthusiasm.

The participants should be briefed to be on time and to have an open mind.

Everyone has one job to do before the workshop: use 15 minutes to list the competition and their main selling argument.

A voluntary, but preferred task is to watch Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk about understanding your WHY.

The idea of the workshop is to extract individual ideas. This is why for the majority of the workshop, work is done individually in a group. Unless stated otherwise, all of the exercises are done individually in silence.

Discuss only when the facilitator encourages it. This may seem odd in the beginning but trust the process. You will be surprised about the method outcomes.

After every stage the facilitator will photograph the results and add them to a slide deck and/or a physical canvas. A physical canvas is recommended, because this helps on maintaining focus of the end result and it is easy to revise the previous steps.

The voting process is the same throughout the workshop. Everyone is given a predetermined amount of dot stickers/vote. When the time to vote comes, everyone silently and simultaneously places their stickers on the note they want to vote for. You are allowed to vote on your own answers and you can spread your dots on different notes or put them all on one. This is up to you.

Tips for running this workshop online

• Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows you to use a large, zoomable canvas.
• If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document to share their ideas but be very clear in regards to editing rights.
• When facilitating group discussion, we’d recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they’d like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.
  
• Use built-in dot voting tools or allocate dot shapes manually in your online whiteboard tool for the voting section. If using Google Docs or similar, have people comment as a vote.

Marketing Strategy Sprint from Karl Filtness at MEOM.