To communicate your strategic marketing plan more effectively, you should communicate it with the three Cs in mind: context, content, and community.
In the military, they have something called an operations order (OPORD). It is a plan that helps units conduct military operations and describes the context on how the unit is organized for the operation to ensure success.
An OPORD organizes its operations into five key paragraphs:
Just like the military puts their plan into the context of their situation and mission, your strategic marketing plan should be put into the context of your business. See how the OPORD translates into business terms. Successful marketers today are viewed as business people, not marketers.
Marketers are chief storytellers for their organizations and they need to provide the context of the marketing strategy and plan. They need to help everyone tell their individual story and the collective story of his or her company better. We are all marketers now.
Successful companies are redefining the traditional marketing organization and in the new era of engagement that requires a commitment from the entire organization.Here are some things to questions to ask you, your team and your company as you provide the context of your strategic marketing plan to your organization.
After your strategic marketing plan is created, it is important to figure out the content to best communicate it.
For example, you should ask these types of questions.
What pieces of content should you create to be the most effective? What channels should you use to communicate the content? Who should communicate this content?
Content should answer the top questions of your community or stakeholders have about your strategic marketing plan.
Just like people search Google to find answers to their questions, can your stakeholders or community find answers to their marketing questions? Is your marketing team collecting those questions they are getting and how are you addressing those questions?
You may want to launch an internal “marketing concierge” program. For example, if people have questions at Forsythe, they can email an email account that can be found in corporate directory their questions. The email account is set up to go to a handful of marketing people who can answer their questions. This can also be done on your intranet or even your company’s blog or website. This concierge approach can also be done on your intranet or even your company’s blog or website.
After context and content are created, it is important to engage and empower your community.Your community is your employees, your partners, your customer or clients, your advocates or influencers. Basically, your community is anyone who impacts your company.
A good example to describe your community is how Netflix got started.In the beginning, they conveyed mission and strategy to people that bought in at a grassroots level before expanding their marketing mission. Netflix relied heavily on public relations by running very targeted campaigns to show their community what their mission and strategy was.
They pulled back the veil. They invested in their community.
Netflix went extremely personal with cinema meet-ups and customers became huge advocates of Netflix. They recruited tens of thousands of people that were grateful that a company was paying attention to them.
Netflix didn’t have retail locations so they offered subscriptions, which eliminated annoying late fees. Customers could watch a video for as long as they wanted or return it and get a new one. Netflix had a disruptive business model because Blockbuster would have to alter its business model to compete with Netflix.