Do you have a great business but struggle with marketing strategy? Or maybe you had a successful marketing strategy that you feel has now gone stale? 

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Marketing, as you well know, is a crucial part of your business. It gets the phone to ring, the customer to your store and the product off your shelf. A successfully planned and implemented marketing strategy can make your business; likewise, a poorly conceived one can break it. 

This article will give your strategic growth planning a boost through the MOST analysis strategy tool in ways you may never have thought it could. It will help you create a practical and actionable plan that can be used alongside tools to help improve your company’s marketing from today. 

Before Going Further

When it comes to business strategy, especially marketing, it is crucial to have an evaluation process in place. It is no good creating a strategy at the beginning of the company’s life or at the start of a particular campaign and sticking to it without deviation even when the strategy is not working as expected anymore.

You need to regularly evaluate where your company is and whether your business’ strategy is helping or hindering your progress. You can do this with the SWOT tool which can help you break your company’s marketing growth strategy into its strengths and weaknesses – what has worked before and can be repeated, as well as strategies and techniques that did not prove to be effective. It is crucial to be honest when analysing these aspects of your business as it gives you the basis to create new strategies. 

SWOT also facilitates your business to look at the opportunities your marketing strategy could capitalise on and the threats to it that may cause issues. It’s recommended to complete the SWOT evaluation as a business regularly so that your marketing strategy can be reactive, focused and current.

Once we have that out of the way, we proceed with the insightful reaction to the SWOT analysis through the MOST tool, which is the best way to create a marketing strategy.

Introduction To MOST Analysis

MOST stands for mission, objectives, strategies and tactics. Each element of MOSt and how it hangs together is outlined here:

Mission

The first step of the MOST analysis tool is to decide on your business Mission. For all of this strategy development process, it should be done as a brainstorming exercise. Gather all perspectives from your board members and senior management team involved. 

The mission of your business needs to be within your desired turnover and profit. Added to this, you should give yourself a timescale ( eg. a year) because this will make your mission objectively measurable, making it possible for you to reflect, evaluate, and re-strategise once the given time has ended and you have your results.  

For the Mission aspect of MOST, don’t worry about the details of your marketing strategy just yet. Just keep it simple and consider high level targets such as turnover and profit with a timescale and you’ll get to the strategising of marketing later in the analysis tool.

Your mission should not be a business ‘vision’ or general direction you want to go in. While these are important to have in mind, they cannot be measured; and therefore, it would make the MOST analysis tool much less helpful.

Objectives

If the mission is your desired top of the ladder, then its objectives are your ladder steps. This is where you start to break down what you need to achieve your mission. 

Again at this point, keep your marketing in mind but the implementation of your marketing strategy will come into action in the latter two sections of this tool. The decisions you have made for your mission will inform the choices you make for your marketing. 

When coming up with your objectives it’s important to remember the ‘which will’ to fully think about why you’ve chosen certain objectives. For example: to achieve your business mission, an objective may be to expand your customer base which will increase your company’s profile. 

Strategies

The strategies are the options you have to achieve your objectives. This is where you should start focusing on your marketing potential. 

With the given objective example of expanding your customer base, a strategy could be to develop a new online social media marketing campaign. Keep in mind previous marketing strategies your business has had, and think about what worked and what didn’t so you have more room to improve. 

With your marketing strategies, always remember the target audience as that will help inform the decisions you make. By using MOST analysis, you can strategise a way to reach your target audience through the software.

For each objective you should have at least two strategies to give you options. This should be where you, as a business, need to brainstorm all the many different marketing techniques you could implement to achieve the objectives you’ve set out to achieve. 

Tactics

The tactics of this tool are the nitty gritty section where you, once more as a business, create your actionable strategic plan. This is where you decide who does what and when. 

Delegate and decide who is in charge of your social media campaign, if that is a strategy you have chosen. Who is going to contact the press and influencers to advertise your product or service if you decide to go that route? Decide on the budget you have for your marketing campaign and who will be in charge of updating it. 

If creating an actionable marketing plan is not a strength of your company then you may want to consider seeking the aid of a part-time marketing director. What is a marketing director? Someone who has a wealth of experience that can help you develop the implementation of your tactics with the other aspects of the MOST analysis tool. 

To Sum It Up

As a business, it is important to evaluate your marketing strategy consistently. Marketing is so reactive to the world around your business and therefore you need to be ready to seize an opportunity once it presents itself to you — and this is where the importance of the evaluation of your SWOT comes in very handy — because you’d have a benchmark. 

By using your MOST analysis, you would be able to create an actionable plan for your business. You can then go on to use the MOST analysis tool with each of your company’s strategic processes.

To begin the process of improving your marketing position today download the Business Strategy Toolkit including the MOST analysis and SWOT tools.

John Courtney is Founder and Chief Executive of BoardroomAdvisors.co which provides part-time Executive Directors (Commercial/Operations/Managing Directors), Non-Executive Directors and paid Mentors to SMEs without either a recruitment fee or a long term contract.

John is a serial entrepreneur, having founded 7 different businesses over a 40 year period, including a digital marketing agency, corporate finance and management consultancy. He has trained and worked as a strategy consultant, raised funding through Angels, VCs and crowd funding, and exited businesses via MBO, MBI and trade sale. He has been ranked #30 in CityAM’s list of UK Entrepreneurs.