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The Role of Scenario Planning in Marketing
Scenario planning is crucial for adapting to unpredictable challenges. It involves sitting down and creating multiple plausible future scenarios, then developing marketing strategies for each. This approach allows marketers to be more proactive rather than reactive, ensuring that marketing strategies remain effective despite any external or internal challenges.
Some common challenges you are likely to face include:
- Low site traffic or site traffic declining
- Site traffic is not converting to sales
- Sales are resulting in low revenue
- Slow velocity to conversion
- Low customer engagement
- Lack of return customers
- Smaller size or value in shopping carts
Introducing the Agile Strategy Board
To facilitate a proactive approach, we like to use what we call a “Agile Marketing Strategy Board,” – a strategic tool designed to help marketing teams prepare for various business scenarios by adjusting different levers of their marketing strategy while staying true to their overall marketing and business goals.
Setting Up Your Agile Strategy Board
In the example above, we’ve created our agile strategy board using a standard Google Sheet. Here’s how’s it’s broken down:
- Levers (Rows): These represent the different aspects of your marketing strategy that you can adjust, such as media spend, messaging, channels, content, targeting, and product.
- Scenarios (Columns): These are potential situations your business might face, like low site traffic, sales not converting, or low engagement.
You’ll want to work with your business’s stakeholders and ensure that you have a clear idea of the potential scenarios that you may have faced or may face in the future.
Here are a couple of scenarios and levers to get you started:
- Scenarios: Low site traffic, traffic not converting to sales, low revenue from sales, slow velocity to conversion, low customer engagement, lack of return customers, and smaller shopping cart sizes.
- Levers: Media spend, messaging, channels, content, targeting, and product.
Leveraging the Agile Strategy Board
In the intersecting cells where a lever meets a scenario, you’ll want to work with your team on creating and brainstorming specific actions or adjustments. For example:
- Low Site Traffic: Look at adjusting the “Media Spend” lever by targeting spend adjustments to boost traffic.
- Traffic Not Converting: Shift your “messaging” to better engage with the audience and increase conversion rates. Or look at your audience targetting to ensure that high-value audiences are seeing your content.
- High traffic not converting: Consider the “Incentives” lever. Create a special offer like a limited-time discount or free shipping to encourage purchases.
As you look at the different scenarios and the corrosponding levers, you’ll start to find the tools at your disposal that you can use when a challenge strikes. If the chain of comand is long, identifying and circultaing these ideas with key stakeholders ahead of time ensures that you can remain agile in challenging times!
Navigating Challenges with Strategic Foresight
As you can see from the above, using the Agile Strategy Board means that you can systematically review your marketing strategy against potential business challenges and identify where you can make changes to improve performance.
The trick here is to plan enough to remain proactive instead of reactive, and this approach allows you to prepare for various possibilities while knowing how to adjust your strategy to excel in the face of challenges.