Strategy and planning
Marketing strategy
A marketing strategy shapes everything you do. By providing a theory of why your organisation is best placed to meet its customer needs, it helps outline how you will do so. This theory should be robust, coherent and doable.
Over seventeen years, I've developed countless marketing and communications strategies for national organisations such as Parkinson's UK, Royal Academy of Arts, Volunteering Matters, and Art Fund, as well as with founders and SMEs such as Yard B Studios.
I can help build a strategy for your marketing needs by working with you and your internal teams. And as an external voice, I can bring a critical eye, ensuring data, trends, and audience insights are helping your organisation evolve its business to meet customer needs while providing a framework for the long term.
What's the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy?
Marketing plans usually map the resources you’re going to spend and how you will allocate them to achieve a set of goals over a set time. They can be implemented effectively because you control them.
A marketing strategy, however, specifies a competitive outcome you wish to achieve - for example, attracting a new customer group or embedding sustainability into your brand. A strategy is reliant on both external and internal factors over an extended timeframe and so can be tricky due to a lack of control. A good marketing strategy can be a north star for your marketing efforts, shaping operational activity over the long term to reach the outcome you are seeking to achieve.
Marketing planning
Plans are great. They give operational guidance and help allocate time, budget, and effort to realise strategic goals. Marketing planning is one of the most requested service my clients ask for, as I work with them to build a marketing plan to deliver strategic aims and even deliver the plan over a series of weeks or months.
As an experienced marketeer who has built and delivered 100s of marketing plans, I can help your marketing deliver by building a plan that includes:
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pinpointing the activities required to achieve a set of goals
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setting a specific time frame for delivering marketing activity
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helping clarify aims and objectives and where to allocate resources, including time, budget and effort,
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identify key performance indicators and metrics to help evaluate and iterate outcomes
Depending on the size and scope of your business, the plans can be a simple-to-action, 2-page document through to an in-depth deck of detailed insights and deliverables.
Costs
My day rate is £450 for strategy and planning work. If you're a registered non-profit, I offer a £70 discount, so charge £380 for registered charities and CICs. I ask for a small 10% deposit in advance to secure my time ahead of starting our work together.
Interested and want to chat?
Then great! Click the button below for an obligation-free discovery call to discuss your needs.
...the way he works and the way he's analysed what we're doing…he really looked deep into what we were already saying about our business and our priorities were…it suddenly made a lot more sense.
He’s invested in what we're doing and believes in it. And that really helps us as we work together. I would 100% recommend working with David.”
Lewis Darby, Founder and Creative Director, Yard B Creative Studio
