Strategic Management

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Process

Consider the process that you would follow when implementing strategic management.

1. Develop strategy: You need to develop a robust strategy. Create a strategy that defines exactly what the organization's vision is, and how it aligns the operational and business goals and strategic objectives.
2. Plan activities: Plan a robust set of activities that you are going to undertake to enable you to deliver to the business strategy that you put in place.
3. Align resources: Align your resources so that you can do those various activities. There's no point planning a hundred activities if you only got two people! Creating a robust structure of framework and a realistic understanding of exactly how you can achieve it is essential.
4. Execute activities: Think about how you go about executing on those various activities.
5. Measure results: Measure some of those key results to get necessary data.
6. Apply data to decision-making: You can then empower yourself to do other things by applying data to decision-making, and developing iterations 2.0 and 3.0, for example.

Factors influencing strategy

You need to consider a range of influencing factors and strategies. You can try to create an ideal strategy, but then overlay both the internal and external context to the whole strategy to see and to sense proof it to make sure that it's robust and actionable.

Internal factors

Internal factors are things like existing organization constraints around budget resourcing. They could be things like culture, process, and bureaucracy. How quick does the organization typically respond? If you're in a slow-moving environment, how do you rapidly increase the way and rate at which someone can execute on that strategy. It may well be the case that you may want to take that strategy and ring fence it to a certain section of your organization. However, that could cause issues when trying to embed it back into the normal running of the organization. So it's that careful balance that you have to try and achieve.

External factors

You may want to think about the external factors. The environment is constantly changing and that presents both opportunities and challenges for your organization.

Quarterly reviews

The key to this whole process is latching on to what you think would be some of the key things that are going to happen in the future. Try and plan for them and then integrate those key actions into your strategy moving forward. Anticipation is a key tenet to be able to plan effectively for your strategy and not be vulnerable to attack later on.

One of the key things we can think about when developing a strategic plan is the review process. When exactly should you be constantly reviewing what you're doing? Flexibility is the key here! You need to be nimble and ensure that your organization has a robust method to change quickly when required.

Having quarterly review cycles could be a really nice way to be able to do this. This could be flexible depending on the type of activity that you're in. Some organizations have to review their approach on a daily basis, sometimes even hourly. In fact, technology will enable you to determine what process works best, and help you make some key tweaks and changes.