The Strategy of Strategic Thinking

everything with purpose
If you don’t know how it works,
why are you doing it?

THE STRATEGY OF
STRATEGIC THINKING
Presented By Chris Gostling,
Momentum Visual

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
- Proverb
Good intentions. Great thinking creates good intentions.
We plan strategically to connect intentions and outcomes,
and not have them be random.

“Look before you leap.”
- Chris likes proverbs
I like proverbs. I like when someone takes a concept and expresses it in the most efﬁcient way possible.

I want you to take away 3 things
from this presentation
There we go. Something more measurable. This is my good intention for you.

Understand Strategies
Go beyond what to do and own “why we do this”
Knowing what strategy to use is not enough.
Understanding why and how to use a strategy will
create a powerful plan.

Understand Value
Developing a strategy costs time.
And money. And energy.
Not having one costs more.
If we know that doing something one way will cost us way more time and money in the long run, we often will regroup and plan things out better.
Having a bad experience with a client and their social media identity can be like ﬁghting with your synchronized swimming partner.

Understand Value
Developing a strategy costs time.
And money. And energy.
Not having one costs more.
Understand Yourself
Know what you’re good at.
And what you’re not good at.
And when to get assistance.
We are not born being great at anything. Some things take time, others take hiring someone else. We are going work through a
scenario today that hopefully will shine some light on how you each approach strategic thinking and social media.

Do Marketing Campaigns Dream?
I have no idea if they do, but the people who create marketing campaigns do when they eventually get
sleep. Producers of marketing campaigns, social media strategies, and brand identities want the best for
the ideas and the executions of these ideas.
What they dream about I like to call the ‘abilities

The Abilities
Stability
Sustainability
Scaleability
These are the abilities that we all want to see from our ideas.
Stability, Sustainability and Scaleability.

The Abilities
Stability - will it work
Sustainability
Scaleability
Is your idea actually going to ﬂy? Is it interesting? Do people get it? Will people care?

The Abilities
Sustainability - will it last
Scaleability
Everything has a shelf life. Brands can last for decades, campaigns for years
sometimes, and fame for at least 15 minutes if we’re lucky.
Is your idea going to last as long as you want it to?

The Abilities
Sustainability - will it last
Scaleability - will it grow
Some can argue that if something isn’t growing, it’s dying. By nature, marketing campaigns don’t tend to last.
They either get forgotten, or they gain market share. A campaign that can expand and evolve is extremely
valuable.

At Momentum we make the abilities a reality by
breathing the same mantra into everything we do.
To make things as clear as possible for both our
clients, and our internal work at Momentum,
we deﬁned a clear mantra to work by.

Awareness Understanding Meaning
Awareness, Understanding, & Meaning. This is our mantra.

Establish
Awareness
Understanding Meaning
This is what most marketing campaigns strive to do. Make consumers pay attention.
But this can be really challenging, depending on how many distractions stand between
your message and the person you’re trying to reach.

Awareness
Create
Understanding
Meaning
A good marketer makes information make sense to everyone they’re trying to reach.
A good marketer makes content as clear as possible for the lowest common denominator, without insulting their more
astute audience. Understanding both the average comprehension level of your consumers as well as the most effective
tonality for your message is extremely important.

Awareness Understanding
Nurture
Meaning
This is the hardest one to make happen. Making something meaningful to someone else is more often than not, a
selﬂess act. For a brand it means letting go of the reason they love their own product or service and inspire people to
be proud of the reasons THEY love it. This comes from understanding the consumer, their behaviour, and the overall
climate of the market you’re in. This is the tone that you set for your messaging.

When a marketing campaign can achieve all of these, success comes naturally.
When one or more is missing, ideas fall short. Campaigns ﬂop. The target
audience hates It. Or worse, they don’t even notice it.

Ok, so where do we start?
We’ve covered what you can get out of this. The goals of stategy, the abilities and an approach to
strategy, Awareness, Understanding, & Meaning. Now lets explore the client.

LOVE ME- Perceived Client Need
This is what our clients want to say to their potential clients. This is not strategy. This is creepy.

ENGAGE WITH OUR BRAND
BUY OUR STUFF
TELL YOUR FRIEND- Actual Client Need
Now this is tangible. This is realistic. We can actually succeed or fail at these goals.
Identifying the actual client need is the ﬁrst step to developing a strategy.

Understanding
The Consumer
To reach the consumer you need to
understand how they process the
content they are exposed to.

Understanding
The Consumer
Filters
We either let information in or we don’t.
This is from a combination of interest,
comprehension, and overall loudness of the
information in question.

Understanding
The Consumer
Filters
Distractions
Assuming we are focused on the consumer who has ﬁltered the content in, the next
consideration is distractions. These are the things that can take the attention of the
consumer you are trying to connect with. These are in the form of other marketing efforts,
personal relationships, and the noise level of society.

Understanding
The Consumer
Filters
Distractions
Engagement
Threshold
Even a connected consumer has a breaking point.
The engagement threshold of the consumer is very important to be aware of in any strategic plan.
Too little or too much content will disengage the consumer. The challenging thing is the threshold range changes and
ﬁguring it out is trial and error most of the time. This is why watching how consumers respond to content is valuable.

Understanding The Tools
Once we have a solid understanding of how consumers think and act,
we get into the arsenal of tools we get to use to reach and connect with them.

“Take this hammer and make me a pie.”
- Your Client
Every person in this room has received
a variation of this. You have the wrong
tool for the task at hand.

The biggest challenge with social
media marketing and strategy is that
the tools all sort of look the same.

The creators of these tools tell us all of these numbers matter. And the client goals have become driven by how
these tools work and less by the goals they would have if they were in a room with these people and not
distracted by the digital.

Plan for disaster, then dress for dinner.
We throw parties and we hope for 75% of the invitees to show up. We send direct mail and hope 3% of it gets open. We create banner
campaigns and high ﬁve our media companies when we receive a 6.5% click through rate. How about if no one comes, or if someone
writes a scathing letter about your environmentally irresponsible DM campaign?

I don’t have all day.
- You
Applying methodology to content creation and management takes time, and effort. It may seem
daunting, but I assure you nothing takes more time and effort than cleaning up a failed social
presence. Besides, as with anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

Establish
Awareness
Create
Understanding
Nurture
Meaning
Take a moment and think about a current project you’re on.
Do all of its various elements, ideas and actions achieve this trifecta?
Whatever the industry, whoever the consumer – if you want a project to
succeed, you need these three elements present. Every single time.

Let’s do this.
I have handed out cards that represent the stages of a
well strategically thought through campaign.
Let’s work together to ﬁnd the order that they need to go in to work.

Client Profile
Local restaurant.
Great menu
Live music weekly
Cool atmosphere.
On a street that is one block away in
three directions from their desired consumers.
Here is the client profile. At this point we can start the process.
You all have the tools to get this going. What is the first step?
** Confirm Real Client Need**

Conﬁrm The Real Client Need
Refresh the tired brand identity
Become a destination restaurant
Become top of mind for locals
Sell more food/drinks
Must not cost a fortune
Once we pass the “love me love me” stage,
we get down to some tangible goals we can actually work towards.
Now where do we go from here?
** Understand The Consumer**

Understand The Consumer
Seek genuine & local experiences
Will pay for quality
Aspire to be cool & original
Regular contact is positively received
Identifying the ﬁlters, distractions, and engagement threshold of this consumer
will give a clear picture of how to approach them. Now what?
**Understand The Tools**

Understand The Tools
Facebook
Vimeo
Menu
Website
Street Postering Campaign
A strategy starts coming together once we have pulled these pieces together. At this point we would start actually generating content.
This could be design, copywriting, storyboards, or a promotional strategy.

Don’t lose the forest for thetrees
Once you have established a solid strategy, and it’s time to create content, our biggest challenge is staying organized so our
planning is executed to match our intentions. Having to compromise because we didn’t plan thoroughly is frustrating.

As you are creating this content we are needing to constantly think about the trifecta

Establish Awareness
You’re not going to talk to your audience on Pinterest if they’re not actually on there.
If establishing awareness is important, what question should we be asking?
**Will the consumers take notice?**

Establish Awareness
Create Understanding
If your message isn’t clear, your audience won’t know what to do with it.
What question do you have to ask?
**Does the content make sense to your audience?**

Establish Awareness
Create Understanding
Nurture Meaning
I know “meaning” is a little conceptual. You can picture the philosophers staring at Facebook screaming
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? This is not what I am thinking here. Anyone see a question we would actually
want to ask to conﬁrm we are nurturing meaning?
**Does the content matter to this consumer?**

Ok, so now I have this epic
content made for tools that our
customers love more than butter.
Now what?
This is a great place to be.
You’ve got a calendar full of engaging content that establishes and supports
all brand goals. Mission accomplished? Not quite yet.
**Establish plan for worst case scenarios before launching**

Disaster Planning (whatifs)
Bad Press
Consumer Complaints
Supply Challenges
Human Error
Poor Response
If you don’t have even a glimmer of answer for any of these things,
you have not thought things through enough.
A lot of factors can threaten a campaign, and it’s your job to research and
discuss up front with your client what those threats might be.

Then pay attention.
Social media changes as fast as we can push it around.
Consumer interest changes, more interesting and pressing things
come up, other brands get noisy.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
- Proverb
We create these magniﬁcent intentions for our ideas. We are not always correct. We mean well.
Our clients pay us because they have faith in our ability to succeed and help grow their business.
We simply need to be mindful that intentions without planning is just dreaming. Strategic thinking is the best way to
see an intention or idea become a successful reality.

“Thank You.”
- Chris

The Strategy of Strategic Thinking

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