strategy

Marketing Canvas Master Class Introduction

Please find below the slide ware I use when starting my Marketing Master Class.

Download the pdf here

Marketing Canvas - Budget

Marketing Canvas - Budget

Discover the importance of a well-structured marketing budget in our comprehensive guide. We delve into the critical role of budgeting within the Marketing Canvas method by Laurent Bouty. Learn how to track and manage marketing expenses, whether you're a multinational corporation or a budding startup. Understand the significance of budgeting in terms of industry benchmarks, and discover strategies to spend wisely. Our guide offers practical tools to translate your budget into action, from understanding your audience to tracking expenses effectively. Moreover, learn to evaluate and improve your budgeting practices with our score-based self-assessment. Lastly, get inspired by a real-life example of green clean use case. Whether you're a marketing novice or an entrepreneur seeking new insights, this article offers an essential exploration of the powerful tool that is your marketing budget.

Marketing Canvas - Pricing

Marketing Canvas - Pricing

Discover how to effectively leverage the PRICING dimension in your Marketing Canvas strategy. This guide simplifies this complex topic, providing examples, tips, and a step-by-step approach to enhance your marketing success.

Marketing Canvas - Engagement

Marketing Canvas - Engagement

Explore the essence of customer engagement with the Marketing Canvas Method. Discover how to measure and improve it with tools like NPS. Drive your business growth by turning customer engagement into your success accelerator.

Marketing Strategy for Millennials from Marketing Cloud

Marketing Strategy for Millennials from Marketing Cloud

Interesting Infographic from Marketing Cloud proposing 5 steps to creating your Marketing Strategy for Millennials. As you might have noticed, I am advocating the use of the Marketing Canvas for designing your Marketing Strategy. Let's check whether these steps fit into the process?

3 Cs in a Digital World

Interesting article from Roland Berger Consultants about Sales in a Digital World. Their thesis is that you need to master 3 Cs if you want to have a voice in this new world:

  1. Develop the Customer Base: It is definitely in line with what I am preaching. You should not only focus on acquisition but also on stimulation and retention. The CLV dimension of the Marketing Canvas is telling you how much you perform versus your ambition;
  2. Orchestrate the Channel: I also agree but I would extend this to Orchestrate the Customer Journey as it is much broader than channel and it is integrating elements like Brand experience, touch-points, emotions and wow moments.
  3. Manage the complexity: it is maybe fluffy as notion. We all know that we should manage the complexity, the question is how should I do that. One possible answer is in the article when they discussed centralisation. I think the key element there is to automate your processes (BPM, scripting, algorithms, ...) in order to reduce the chaos and uncertainty. but don't forget to keep the human part.

Source: Roland Berger, Think Act, The digital future of B2B sales

Questions you should ask with the Marketing Canvas

Questions you should ask with the Marketing Canvas

Marketing canvas is an easy yet powerful tool you can use for assessing your Marketing Strategy. It works for small and very large companies. It can be used by novices or experts. A list of key questions to be asked can be found in this article. Enjoy!

Why you need a bold question for your Marketing Strategy?

What is the best way to start defining the marketing strategy of your company, business or activity? My proposal is to start with a bold strategic question! Why?

How To Define Your Commercial Plan for Your Startup with Marketing Canvas?

When you work on your commercial strategy for your startup, you can facilitate this conversation with using the Marketing Canvas (more on the canvas here). Please find below 10 steps you should follow:

KEY QUESTIONS TO BE ASKED

  1. What is your goal? Big Idea? Define a question that will clarify your projected future like How can we achieve 1M€ after one year of operation? How can we generate 5% growth next year? How can we differentiate our brand in a digital world where predictive technologies driven by AI will become a standard?

  2. What is the problem you are trying to solve? Clarify the job to be done for your customers.

  3. Who is our buyer and user? Define your persona.

  4. If not you who else? Define the category where you are playing and what are the alternatives for your buyer.

  5. How do you want to be remembered? What people will say about you? Your BRAND

  6. What is your answer to the problem your buyer has? What is your value proposition? Do you have USP, ESP, Clear Pricing and Proofs?

  7. What experience people will have with you? Will it generate sales and engagement? JOURNEY

  8. How do you discuss with your buyer? Do you have conversations? Do you listen? Do you have content, stories, influencers? Which media do you use?

  9. Does it make any financial sense? What is your Marketing Budget and Revenue?

  10. If you don't think it all works, iterate one more time

PROCESS FOR ZERO APPROACH

As a startup, you should define your strategic hypothesis. It is slightly different than an existing business because you are starting from a white page.

Part 1- Target, Positioning

Define your key customer target (JTBD, ASPIRATION, PAINS & GAINS). As you are starting your business, you have no information on ENGAGEMENT.

Define your Brand strategy (PURPOSE and POSITIONING) and explain how you will differentiate your brand versus competitors. Explain what could be the VALUES of this brand and your IDENTITY strategy.

Define your Value Proposition (FEATURES, EMOTIONS and PRICING). Describe core, differentiated and unique features/emotions to support your Brand Strategy, matching your customer target and helping you to achieve your financial objectives. Do you have any PROOFS supporting your value proposition?

Part 2- Go To Market

Define your go to market approach and more specifically: Describe funnel journey (pre and post purchase) for your go to market: MOMENTS, EXPERIENCE, CHANNEL and MAGIC. Don't forget to align this with your brand strategy.

Describe your conversation strategy for your go to market. LISTENING, CONTENT, MEDIA and INFLUENCERS if any.

Part 3 - Metrics

Define your hypothesis in terms of metrics for your business: ACQUISITION (speed of acquisition), ARPU (average spending for each customer on the 12 months), LIFETIME (your churn assumption) and BUDGET (amount of € needed for supporting your strategy).

ASSESS YOUR ZERO APPROACH WITH YOUR TEAMS

Use the canvas and answer to these questions using all dimension while asking the same question:

Will my .... help me to achieve my goal?

RED: Not at all; GREEN: Definitely

Visualise your Commercial Strategy on Marketing Canvas

Visualise your Commercial Strategy on Marketing Canvas

RED dimension must be reviewed or mitigated because that are not helping you to achieve your goal.

Interested in the Marketing Canvas, you can find more information here

Resources

Infographic on the Marketing Canvas Process

The tool has been designed for facilitating the discussion when designing your strategy.

High-level process is:

  • You start from an ambition/question (like increase revenue by 5%, have more digital transactions, be more meaningful, ...) 
  • You discuss using the 28 dimensions asking:
    • What's blocking you to achieve your ambition? (brakes)
    • What's helping you (Accelerator)?
    • You can support this rating using any information, knowledge you have but it works also if you only rely on qualitative information.
  • Then you map your answer on the Canvas. Red are brakes; Green are accelerators.
  • Then you try to analyse these brakes/accelerators and understands what cause them, what are the correlation.
  • Then you start ideating (brain-writing, co-create, ...), find crazy or impossible ideas) on what you could do (magic diamond, do things better, do different things).
  • Then you prioritise your ideas.
  • If you can you test it.
  • Then you have your action plan.
Infographic Marketing Canvas

Infographic Marketing Canvas

Marketing Strategy in Context

If you want to design the marketing strategy for your business, you should first start to analyse where you will play. What does it mean? It means that your product/service will be associated by consumers/buyers with other alternatives they have on the market (maybe no alternative exists which means that you creating a new category also referred as a blue ocean).