• First, determine what are the tangible benefits of your product or service. Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” from your target’s point of view. This will help you form a realistic picture of what you are trying to market.
  

• Make a list of your audiences. Who are you trying to reach? Who is most interested in what you have to offer? Be as specific as possible. (For example, instead of “teachers,” try “middle school social studies teachers in Wisconsin.”)

• Going audience by audience, determine:
  • How you already communicate with them and how you’d like to communicate with them. Where do they hang out online? Are there any missed opportunities?  
  • What do you want each audience to do? What is a teeny, tiny first step they can take to get there? And even better: how can you incentivize that first step?
  • What are their values and beliefs? Can you find the intersection between what you want and what they want?
  • What sort of messaging is likely to resonate with them? Do you know their pain points and can you speak their language? (hint: do some research!)

Research is the next step after your audience analysis in the MARKET™ method, followed by Key Content and Channels, Evaluation, and Tracking. For a deeper dive into strategic planning, consider becoming a Certified Communications Campaign Manager through the Strategic Planning Institute, where you'll have exclusive access to the tables and templates needed to write your own strategic communications plan.

A question that many strategic planners ask is: "How do I find resources to implement my strategic plan?"

In other words, once the planning is done, how do I convince my organization's leaders to give the implementation team the resources, including money, time, and staff, that we need to make it a reality?

As a strategic planning professional, here are three tactics that you can use to guarantee that the implementation team has the resources it needs to execute your strategic plan:

1. Involve your leaders from the beginning, and keep them updated. Have an open discussion with your leaders at the onset of the strategic planning process, and clarify with them the scope of the planning and the available resources that they will be able to commit to implement the plan. Keep them updated on the planning as is progresses.
2. Invite budget officers to be part of your strategic planning team. That way, you'll have access to some financial experts who can provide a reality check to the strategic planning group along the way.
3. Offer to pilot smaller-scale projects. If you don't have a full budget available to implement part of your strategy, devise a scaled-down pilot project that you can carefully monitor to show potential. Present the success of this pilot project as you ask for more money to scale up your efforts.

After you ask that all-important question, "Where do you want to go?" there is always one that naturally follows: "What would it take to get there?"


Note that the way the question is crafted is optimistic. We didn't ask: "Is this really possible? What are all the things that stand in our way? What if we fail?" 

Imagine that our goal is the summit of a mountain, and your team of rock climbers (strategic rock climbers?) must examine the face of the mountain to see which route will best get us there.

By keeping this next question deliberately open, we lead our strategic planning team to open their minds and think more creatively about all the paths, however ambitious, that could possibly lead to our goal. We focus on possibilities, not impediments. Save the talk of impediments for later on in the process! 

The idea of a strategic plan can be huge and intimidating. You might wonder - how do I get from zero to detailed, actionable plan?

Success lies in knowing which questions to ask, and when. Good strategic planning professionals don't start at the beginning - they start at the end. 

Your first question to your client should always be: "Where do you want to go?" Ask the client(s) to paint a detailed picture of where they would like their company to be.

By starting at the end, you have a destination in mind. It's much easier to map out a strategic plan with a clear destination than a fuzzy one.

Often, in the course of a strategic planning process, people ask us to help them create a Facebook page for their business or initiative. They are confident that they want this page and have already mapped out when they’ll build it and when it will launch. They speak about this Facebook page as one of their goals.


We usually nod and ask them, “What do you hope to achieve with this Facebook page?”


They’ll pause and think and often answer, “We want fans.”


We’ll challenge them further. “What do you want to be different as a result of launching this Facebook page? How will creating this page contribute toward a business goal?”


Through our conversation we often find out that actually, maintaining the Facebook page is not a strategic goal for them - it’s an activity that should be supporting a higher-level goal. Just collecting fans and likes for their own sake does little to support goals of a business.


At this point, we advise clients to take a step back and start with their target audience. Does this audience even use Facebook? Perhaps another social outlet would better-reach the demographic in question. If Facebook is the best place to find their target audience, how do they plan to both attract fans and convert these fans to customers?


It’s important to think through WHY you want to engage in a specific activity, WHO it is for, and HOW it will support your strategic goals before taking it on.

What exactly is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process of defining and documenting where you want to go, developing an implementation plan with specific activities, and determining your metrics of success, all while considering your resources and challenges.

Why would we need a strategy?

If you’re wondering if you even need a strategy, the answer is: you already have one. Every business already has some sort of a strategy, whether it’s a vague idea confined to the owner’s head or a thorough written strategic plan well-known by everyone in the organization.  Your organization will benefit many times over by taking the time to do it right and developing a strategic plan from start to finish using an industry-standard method, like the Strategic Planning Institute’s MARKET Method™, to think through each step and to produce a strategic plan which helps guide your organization.

In fact, strategic planning saves you time in the long term - since you have already thought through your priorities, approaches, and activities, you can make decisions more quickly and trim activities and busy work that are not contributing toward your goals.