How do I get the wider team bought into my strategy?

Transcript

– Getting senior decision makers and other members of your team bought into your strategy is a real big challenge, and it’s one that many marketing managers and marketing directors often come across. The best way to get a wider team included into the strategy is to make sure that the strategy is a reflection of different people’s identities and ideas. What you want a marketing strategy to be for a brand, is a representation of the brand, of the company itself. Not necessarily a representation of one individual within it. I’d get the wider team brought into the strategy by discussing what the client wants. So if they wanted more brand awareness, for example, then I know to talk to the Facebook team and get some social ads running. Because quite often it is not enough to just have your marketing team bought into a strategy, like, you need support from the MD. You might need support from other departments. And it’s really important that anything that gets launched sort of campaign wise, is a collaborative effort, and really reflects the sort of the company as a whole. My biggest advice for you, if you’re watching this video is to bring them in as early as possible into the decision making process. So how you do that as you bring everyone together in focus groups and group discussions, to get an idea of what the identity is of what the message there is you want to portray. It all depends on what the client wants as to which members of the team needs to get brought in. If you’ve run off and you’ve got some quotes or some strategies from different agencies, or you’ve created your own strategy yourself, and you get to the budget stage, and you smash that onto the managing director’s desk, he’s going to be complete, he or she’s going to be completely and utterly out of depth of what’s actually going on. Why are we doing this? How we thought about this? And the reality is if you bring that managing director, right to the start of the decision making process, when you’re really coming up with the reasonings, the ideas, how you want to push forward in different areas, they’ll be much more bought into the process and you’ll have a better chance of signing off the project. So there’s different ways of sort of getting people’s interest. Whether you first have to prove that it works to them, or whether you just straight up get them involved, pull them into a meeting, get ideas sort of bouncing around the office and everyone, get everyone excited about it. Because if everyone’s pulling in the same direction, then your campaign is just more likely to be a success. Because the reality is, if you didn’t have buy in with the wider team, your strategy really won’t get going because when it comes to needing things from certain departments or you need some extra support from another area, the only way to get that support, the only way to push for in that area is to make you have a wider team involved. And then outwards from that, what you can then do is take those insights and then form them into briefs. So you give those to the advertising team, and the advertising team then bring that brief to life. So it begins at the start of the process of making sure that what ends up being the message and the identity of that end result, is collected at the beginning of the process, everyone is involved and then, you know, that end result, everyone in the team feels like they have ownership over that end result, which means that everyone wins or loses together, which is what you want.