How to Run a Successful Marketing Strategy Workshop

A marketing strategy workshop is a great way to align your team, define goals, and to create a cohesive plan on how to drive business growth. A well-executed workshop can generate new ideas, improve collaboration, and set the foundation for a robust marketing strategy. This guide will give you everything you need run a workshop on your own, with a step-by-step approach to help you organise the workshop easily, and to focus on the right subjects.

Prepare Your Workshop:

• Invite the appropriate stakeholders, managers, operational staff and other people that are relevant for your workshop.
• Ask them to prepare a description of their customer segments as detailed as they can get
• Prepare your Audience Analysis in Samhub. Learn more.
• Create a document called “Marketing Strategy Workshop” (or something more fun it you like) so that you can takes notes that are easy to share with the team

Define the Objective

Set goals and clarify the objectives of your marketing strategy workshop. This will help you navigate through sessions and focus on the right subjects. Here are some examples of goals you can use:

• Identify target audience and market segments
• Develop a positioning statement and brand identity
• Determine key marketing channels and tactics
• Set measurable goals and KPIs
• Create buyer personas
• Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

By clearly outlining these objectives, you can structure your workshop accordingly and ensure that everyone is focused on achieving the desired outcomes.

Plan the Workshop Agenda

Once you have defined your objectives, create a detailed agenda for the workshop. Consider including the following key elements:

• Introduction and icebreaker activities to encourage team collaboration
• Overview of your current marketing strategy
• Interactive sessions to brainstorm ideas and gather insights
• Group exercises to develop strategies and action plans
• Breakout sessions for small group discussions and idea generation
• Presentation of individual or group findings

Ensure that the agenda is well-rounded, allowing enough time for participation and discussion amongst team members.

Workshop day: Start with an Introduction

Start your workshop with a quick introduction. Talk about the goals and ideal outcomes for the workshop. Explain why you are doing it, why it’s important and how you will use it for future improvement of your business results.

Don’t forget to let everyone take part in the discussions and make sure to lower the guards so that everyone gets to talk. Remember that it’s not always the most experienced people that comes up with the best ideas or thoughts.

Review Previous Results and Marketing Activities

In order to improve and develop, you need to understand the past and what your previous efforts have resulted in. Talk about previous campaigns, what you have been focusing on and the outcome of all the work your team has done. Categorise these things into good and bad (or less good) results.

Now, ask the participants to share their thoughts, related to the questions you sent out with the invitation. Their opinion and view on different subjects are important to see if your team is aligned, and to identify weaknesses and strengths of your marketing strategy.

Examples of things to focus on:

• Can you describe our ideal customer?
• Which characteristics are representative for our customers and target groups?
• What is the size of our market and where is the potential for growth?
• How do we reach them, fill our top-funnel and convert them into paying customers?
• Did any campaign perform better than the other? If so, why?

Review Your Samhub Audience Analysis

Now that everyone have presented their thoughts, it’s time to have a look at what your data says. It’s a common thing to rely a marketing strategy on gut feeling and instincts, like some of the thoughts above might rely on. But we will help you to combine experience and internal knowledge with data-driven insights to create a marketing strategy that will succeed.

Here are some examples of what you can find in the analysis:

Key Customer Segments:

This widget shows the distribution of your customers based on 14 pre-defined segments, in which the whole population is mapped. This segmentation method is called Mosaic™️ Lifestyles, and it’s the world’s leading segmentation method based on trusted and verified population data on everyone above 18 years old.

The larger, higher up and more to the right a bubble is placed, the more importan is that customer segment to your business. This also means that a smaller, lower placed bubble to the left is a less important customer group. In this case, it means that your most important customers are the Mosaic™️ group “N”. It also shows that you shouldn’t focus on group “G”, “M” and “B”.

Customer Personas and Descriptions

All customer segments in Samhub comes with a painting description to help you understand who they are. This information is very good to discuss with your team so that everyone have a clear picture of your customers. A good customer persona also makes it easier to create relevant messaging and improve targeting.

Market Size and Market Penetration

The analysis is based on the whole population, which makes it easy to calculate your market size and market penetration. We know how many people there are in each segment, and compares the number of customers you have to the segments total audience size. This will help you understand how established your company is right now, and more importantly what the potential is for your business.

The fact that we know who they are and where they live makes it easier for you to acquire more customer from the right segment. If you want to learn more about how you target your most valuable customer groups, feel free to schedule a demo of Samhub.

Lifestyle Interests

Knowing your customers is key to create relevant offers and messages that relates with your target audience. This widget shows what your selected segment like, and don’t like. For example can we see that the “N”-group are very interested in hunting and cars, and less interested in vacations abroad and football.

Lifestyle interests is also a very good base for creative workshops, for example when you’re designing ad creatives or marketing campaigns. You will have a higher chance on reaching out with your message if your product is shown in a context that potential customers like.

Detailed Audience Insights

Everything you ever wanted to know about your customer can be found here. Our detailed audience insights gives you over 600 insights about who they are, what they like, where you reach them and how they live their life. That’s a lot of information you can use to improve your strategy and more easily acquire new customers to your business.

Now it’s time to compare your key takeaways and ideas with the insights you’ve got from the analysis. Try to find things that match, or are opposite of each other, and discuss it further with the participants. 

After digging deep into these ares, your will have a solid foundation for creating your new marketing strategy based on valuable experience and data-driven insights. Let’s move on to the next step!

Define Your New Marketing Strategy

Now it’s time to make the final conclusions and summarise insights into a new marketing strategy. What you want to include in your strategy is optional, but here are a few things that we recommend to include:

Target Audience

What is your audience strategy? Do you want to deepen your penetration in your key audiences or do you want to transition your brand into new audiences? What marketing channels are relevant for your audience segment, what are their behaviours and what are the suitable channels to reach them? Can you identify tow or three communicative segments so that your marketing is managable? 

Customer Personas and Ideal Customer Profile

Define your communicative segments and describe them as well as you can: based on purchase behaviour, based on online behaviour and based on Mosaic Lifestyles.

If you can derive the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) you get a gold star. 

Marketing Goals, Objective and KPI:s

Agree on what marketing goals you have. What market share do you aim for? What penetration do you want per key audience? What conversion rate do you want to have for your ICP? Is your objective solely monetary or do you have brand objectives? What KPI:s will define if you succeed or not? 

Unique Value Proposition

What is your differentiator? What makes you stand out against the competition and what audiences do these values resonate with? Will the value be communicated differently in different audiences? 

Marketing Budget and Plan

What budgets are required to reach the brand goals, sales goals and KPI:s that you have defined? What will be your “always on” budget and strategy and what will be your tactical campaign budget? Will you be able to have the desired audience penetration with the budget you have set? This is where the strategy, the key audiences, the customer persona and golas comes together.  

Don’t forget to set a new date where you meet to evaluate your new marketing strategy, and make necessary changes based on the results generated. No one get’s it right the first time.

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