When strategy isn't strategy ♟️

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #23 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your week. We’ve been out and about seeing clients, from the crypts of Lambeth Palace to the estate of Waverley Abbey. We always love in-person meetings, so shout if you fancy a coffee sometime. ☕️

Anyway, on with today’s newsletter - do you have a strategy?

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

📩 And if you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

Let’s talk about strategy ♟️

More specifically, social media strategy.

We all think we know what good strategy looks like, but we’ve twisted its definition beyond recognition.

We’ve made it scary; the 20 page strategy doc, the 435 slide presentation, “sign it off with the board and make sure it looks meaty.”

And how many layers of strategy do we need?

An organisational strategy, a marketing strategy, a digital marketing strategy AND a social media strategy?

So that’s actually four 20 page strategy docs then…

Madness.

We get bogged down in the strategies we write, filing them away to never be seen again.

It doesn’t have to be that way 😮

Let’s boil it down and be clear about what a strategy is. I’d summarise it as:

A set of guiding principles that seek to overcome a specific challenge or exploit a specific opportunity.

The number one problem I see when reviewing social media strategies is people diving into the “how”.

“We’ll post 5 times a week”

“We’ll focus our attention on Instagram”

“We’ll repurpose podcast content for Reels.”

“We’ll reach a younger audience.”

That’s not strategy, that’s tactics. It’s merely one small part of the whole.

One of the best books I’ve read on strategy is “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt.

I’d highly recommend it to you. (In fact I’ll post my copy to the first person to reply to this email with their address.)

He unpacks it as “The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action”. We too often skip straight to the coherent action, without thinking about a diagnosis or a guiding policy. The reason for that is the first two elements are actually very hard.

We all like to think about ourselves as strategic thinkers (We’re doing a lot of recruitment at the moment, and I don’t think I’ve seen one applicant who didn’t describe themselves as a strategic thinker.) but the skills needed to diagnose and write a guiding policy are not easy.

But let me give you a generic example to get an idea of the kind of thing you need to be thinking of…

If you are an organisation that has loyal repeat customers but very few new ones, your diagnosis might be something like: We have low brand awareness amongst our target audience.

The guiding principles might therefore be:

• We optimise for social media reach for the next 12 months and ignore all other metrics

• Our content plan is guided by social media trends, even if it means bending our brand guidelines a little.

• We divert 90% of sales messages to email marketing for 6 months

• We are agile and reduce the layers of sign-off, even though we know that comes with a slight increased risk.

And only when your diagnosis and guiding policies have been firmed up do you start on the coherent actions (AKA tactics).

The guiding principles are so helpful for any strategy.

They help you make quick decisions, inform stakeholders of the logic of future actions, and empower your social media team to do their best work.

And here’s the most important part:

Keep your social media strategy to a one pager.

OK, you can have two pages if you want, but keep it short.

It should be short in length, and short in timeline. You should be writing a new one every 6-12 months.

I could keep talking, but I’ll stop there.

If you want to talk strategy over a coffee, I’m all ears ☕️👂

Anyway, see you next week ✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

🎧 A lot of the thoughts above were prompted by Dan listening to a brilliant podcast with the ex-head of social from Ryan Air. Chances are anyone reading this doesn’t work for a company the size of Ryan Air, but it’s a brilliant lesson in strategy.

📺 Joe’s getting into Hot Wheels races on YouTube 🏎️🔥 even to the point where he’s building a permanent track in his office “for his son”. We’re all cheering him on because it looks amazing!

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍