Marketing strategy · Positioning, channels, budget logic
Most marketing plans are a list of activities with a budget attached. A strategy is the set of decisions that explains why those activities and not others: who you are for, what you are claiming, which channels can carry that claim, and what you will stop doing.
I build that layer with you, and make it specific enough that a team can act on it on a Monday.
Experience includes
You rarely notice the absence directly. You notice the symptoms.
Where growth is actually constrained today — demand, conversion, retention, pricing or capacity. Strategy that treats the wrong constraint is expensive.
Which customers are worth acquiring, on evidence from your own data rather than a persona workshop.
What you claim, against whom, and what makes the claim believable. Written as sentences a salesperson would actually say.
Which channels serve which stage, what each is accountable for, and which should stop.
Why it matters: judging demand creation by last-click kills the thing that fills the funnel.
How much, where, and the reasoning — so allocation can be defended to a board and revisited on evidence.
A tree connecting business outcomes to marketing metrics to channel metrics, with definitions agreed across marketing and sales.
Channel decisions stop being taste. Each one has a stated job and a number attached to it.
Marketing and sales argue about strategy instead of about whose figure is correct.
Improvements compound, because the plan has an order and the order survives contact with a busy quarter.
Directional, not guaranteed. What a strategy produces depends on execution capacity and the market, and I will not put a percentage on it in advance.
01
Input: performance data, CRM, sales conversations, and the commercial plan.
Output: the actual constraint, named.
02
Action: segment selection and positioning, tested against real won and lost deals.
Output: a position you can defend.
03
Action: channel roles, budget allocation and the stop list.
Output: decisions with reasoning, not options.
04
Action: the KPI tree and the reporting that serves it.
Output: numbers that can settle an argument.
05
Action: a quarterly cycle that revisits the strategy on evidence rather than on mood.
Output: a plan that stays current.
I have been handed strategy documents that could not be executed by the team that received them, and it shapes what I hand over. Everything in the plan is checked against your real capacity, your real approval process and your real internal politics.
The clearest sign of a serious strategy is the stop list. If nothing is being stopped, nothing has actually been decided.
The audit establishes what is true now. The strategy decides what to do about it. Most engagements start with the audit because strategy built on assumptions about the current state is guesswork with better formatting.
Not in this engagement. Strategy produces the decisions and the framework; execution is either your team’s or a separate scope.
It depends on data availability and how many people need to be involved in the positioning work. I scope it in writing after the first conversation rather than quoting a standard length.
Then it gets argued out before it is published. A position nobody in the business believes will not survive its first difficult sales call.
If the current plan is a list of activities rather than a set of decisions, a strategy conversation is the fastest way to see the difference.