Here’s a situation that comes up more frequently than you might expect: A business owner sits down with us and says, “We have a strategy, but we’re still struggling.” When we ask to see the strategy, they spend a few minutes tracking down a Google Doc they put together. It’s a solid document, too. The problem is that it hasn’t been touched (or even viewed) since it was created.
The problem usually isn’t the quality of the thinking. It’s that the strategy was designed to be written, not executed. That’s what makes most marketing strategy development fall apart. It’s also why businesses that have invested real time and money into building a strategy can still feel like they’re operating without one.
What Marketing Strategy Development Means
A marketing strategy isn’t the same thing as a marketing plan. Your strategy is the what and the why (positioning, target audience, the problems you solve and for whom). Your plan is the how and the when (channels, calendar, tactics).
Most businesses either conflate the two or skip straight to the plan. When that happens, sure, action is being taken, but with no direction.
Marketing strategy development, when done right, is a process where cutting corners can be catastrophic. It involves research, deliberate decision-making, documentation that the team can use, and a system for executing and adjusting over time.
Why Most Marketing Strategies End Up On a Shelf
If you’ve built a strategy that never gets used, you’re in good company. We see it all the time, but that doesn’t mean the strategy itself was bad. Think of it as a New Year’s Resolution. Most of them are lofty goals, but by the end of January, they’ve been abandoned. More often than not, it’s because there was no plan in place to keep things on track.
For a business, though, it gets more complex. There are three patterns we see most often with marketing strategies:
- It was built in isolation. The strategy gets developed by leadership or an outside consultant, handed off to whoever is doing the work, and nobody on the execution side has any input into it. When the priorities shift or reality sets in, there’s no ownership of the document.
- It’s structured like a document, not an operating system. The document tells you where you want to go, but not the smaller steps you need to take to get there. Without a clear connection between the strategic decisions and the day-to-day work, the strategy becomes something you reference in a quarterly meeting and immediately forget.
- It wasn’t built for the resources you have. Grand goals. Limited resources. This is the most common issue for smaller businesses. The strategy assumes a dedicated team, planning cycle, and budget headroom that are unrealistic or don’t exist; as a result, nothing gets done to reach the goals it outlines.
“People treat strategy as a project instead of a process. They finish the document, check the box, and think they did strategy. But strategy isn’t a thing you finish. It’s an ongoing perspective on the work, and the document should be evergreen. Without a real process to revisit it, even a great strategy ends up on a shelf.”
–Jacob Brain, Principal, Business Operations
The Enterprise Framework Problem
A lot of the content out there around building a marketing strategy for small businesses is just enterprise methodology scaled down to seem tailored to small operations. Look more closely, though, and you’ll realize it assumes you have a research budget, a team of stakeholders to align, a formal review cycle, and the kind of runway that lets you spend six weeks in discovery before making a single decision.
When a 10-person company tries to follow that process, it falls apart because the framework wasn’t designed for its reality. What smaller businesses really need is a leaner strategy that produces clear direction quickly.
Side note: Google is built to favor enterprise companies. If you want to compete, you have to know how it all works.
What a Marketing Strategy Development Process Should Include
There’s no universal template, but there is a logical sequence.
Here’s how a functional marketing strategy process tends to work:
- Foundation first: Before anything else, understand your market. Where do you stand, who are you up against, and where are the opportunities?
- Positioning and messaging: Who are you talking to, what problem do you solve for them, and why should they choose you over your competitors? This one’s hard to get right, but the effort is worth it.
- Channel selection: Only after positioning is defined does it make sense to decide where to show up. Channel decisions made without positioning can lead to aimless posts, wasted budget, and other random acts of marketing.
- Execution planning: Translate the strategy into a system that runs whether or not the owner is in the room.
- Measurement and adjustment: Define what success looks like before you start. Build in regular reviews that evaluate results and prompt decisions.
“During our marketing strategy development for clients, we ensure every marketing and sales effort is working together to meet the same goal. That way, no effort is wasted; every piece of content gets us a little bit closer to the goal each day. That’s when we really start to see our partners crush their goals year after year!”
–Mackenzie Clark, Senior Account Manager
How to Know if Your Development Process Is Working
Most businesses evaluate marketing by sales, traffic, and leads. These are important, but it’s worth separating the question of whether your strategy is working from whether your development process produced a strategy that could work to begin with.
Signs it’s working
- The team knows the priorities without being reminded.
- Marketing activities connect to a stated goal.
- You have a system for reviewing and adjusting.
- Everyone gives roughly the same answer when asked “what’s our marketing focus right now?”
Signs it’s not
- Tactics keep changing without a documented reason why.
- You’re measuring activity instead of outcomes.
- Everyone gives a different answer when asked “what’s our marketing focus right now?”
- The strategy document hasn’t been opened in weeks.
If the second list feels familiar, the issue usually is that the strategy development didn’t produce something built to survive contact with the real world.
When Does It Make Sense to Work With a Marketing Strategy Agency?
Some businesses can develop strategy internally, but there are situations where outside expertise makes more sense:
- You’re too close to your business and can’t put yourself in an outsider’s shoes.
- You’ve tried multiple times to build a strategy internally, but can’t seem to make it stick.
- You’re running tactics, but mostly randomly. There’s no connection between them, so the message falls flat.
- You have plenty to keep you busy already (you’re a business owner after all) and don’t have the bandwidth to develop a cohesive plan.
If you’re evaluating a marketing strategy agency, look for a few of the following: Do they have a documented process, or are they just going to interview you and hand you a deck? Do they distinguish between strategy and execution? Even more importantly, do they have a way to bridge the two?
And critically, are they measuring results and calibrating their strategy to match the reality?
The Problem Isn’t Effort
Many businesses have struggled with marketing, but it’s not for lack of trying. They’re struggling because the marketing strategy process they used wasn’t designed to close the gap between strategy and execution.
A well-researched, thoughtfully written strategy document is still just a document. It’s the user manual that goes straight from the box to the junk drawer. It can only become a system when the development process connects it to how the team works, how it’s measured, and how decisions get made when things shift.
If your strategy stays tucked away in a drawer or forgotten server folder, the answer isn’t a better document; it’s a different process.
That’s the problem we built the AW Method to solve, and it’s the conversation we’re always happy to have. Ready to build a marketing strategy that gets executed? Let’s talk!
