How to Write a Strategy

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1Writing a Marketing Strategy

2Writing an Organizational Strategy

3Thinking Broadly About Strategy

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Writing a strategy document is an important part of organizational planning. Whether you're developing a strategy for your business, for a marketing plan, or some other purpose, writing the strategy down will provide you and your institution with a guide for moving forward. Usually, you'll start by identifying your audience and the purpose of the strategy. Think about your organization's end goal and brainstorm steps you can take to get there. Be clear and direct when writing a strategy, and have someone edit it once you've finished.

Steps

Method 1

Method 1 of 3:

Writing a Marketing Strategy

1. 
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   Justify your marketing strategy. While the specific reasons for a marketing strategy will vary, having a marketing strategy in place is important for any business or organization. A written marketing strategy will provide a guide for future marketing efforts and reduce challenges when new marketing plans are developed.

   • Emphasize that with a marketing strategy in hand, your organization or business could improve its performance and operate more efficiently.
   • Since the marketing strategy is often reviewed by the head of the company or an executive, it is important to write a strong marketing strategy to ensure the marketing department receives adequate attention and resources.
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   Identify the customer. Unless you have a clear sense of who the target audience of the marketing campaign is, you will have difficulty writing an effective marketing strategy. If you are targeting multiple consumer segments, you might need to devote a section on each population.

   • For instance, if your product or service is aimed at both young people generally and Hispanics specifically, you’ll need to be clear about whether a single strategy is appropriate for both (it probably isn’t), and how the two campaigns will be developed.
   • When writing the strategy, lay out any evidence you have about who your core customer base is. Draw on polls, census data, and customer feedback surveys to establish the demographics of your consumers. Think about their age, race, class, and gender.
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3. 
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   Develop your vision. With your customer in mind, sit down with your team to think about how you can best market the product or service you offer. Start brainstorming ideas about what customers might like in the future based on advertisements and imagery that you know they've respond to before. Write the best of these ideas into the marketing strategy so that you can reference them later.

   • Evaluate your current and past marketing campaigns to discover what worked and what didn’t. Include these findings in your strategy to help explain what future strategies should and shouldn’t do. Use this section of the strategy to find out who you are and who you want to be as an organization.
   • If you have trouble figuring out what your customers are interested in, write a list of possible steps you could take to find out more. For instance, you might recommend a more thorough data-gathering process during which the marketing team investigates similar brands and products, and evaluates how their marketing campaigns succeeded or failed.
   • You might also suggest more intense research like focus groups consisting of your core customers or a new customer market you’re interested in attracting. In focus groups, you can give questionnaires or conduct interviews with specific members of a relevant demographic to find out what they’re interested in. For instance, you might show two different ads to a group of Millennials and see which they responded more positively to.
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   State the goals of and obstacles to your marketing strategy. When writing this part of the strategy, you might want to use a three-columned page with goals in the far left column, obstacles to the goals in the next column, and solutions to overcoming the obstacles in the far right column. Think about both internal and external goals and obstacles when writing this section.

   • Internal goals include hiring more staff and creating more stable workflows within the marketing department.
   • Internal obstacles might be a lack of space or funding.
   • External goals might include improving the public’s image of a brand, product, or service.
   • External obstacles might be the stock market or consumer attitudes toward your product or service.
5. 
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   Tell your brand story. Your brand story is the character of the brand you’re trying to develop with the marketing strategy. What does your company or organization stand for in the eyes of the consumer? When you write the strategy, be sure you explain what the company is all about, and how the marketing strategy relates to the overall image the company is trying to develop. The strategy might express to consumers that the brand is hip, well-established, stable, dependable, or associated with some other feeling or idea. Write a strategy to communicate your brand story through:

   • Advertising (radio, online, and in television)
   • Social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram)
   • Web presence (a website and online store)
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   Propose teaming up with your partners. Partners could be other corporations or agencies, or they could be customers. Customer interaction and collaboration can inspire feelings of loyalty and create new interest on the part of the consumer. In your written strategy, list your partners and suggest some projects that could include them to help build the brand.
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Method 2

Method 2 of 3:

Writing an Organizational Strategy

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   Elaborate on your organization’s identity. What is your organization about? What is your company’s vision and mission statement? Use these as a jumping-off point to write briefly about your organization’s purpose and values.

   • If you don’t have a mission statement, you should develop one. The mission statement should describe the company’s daily operations. For instance, an eyeglass manufacturing center might have a mission statement that reads, “Our mission is to provide quality eyewear at affordable prices.”
   • If you don’t have a vision statement -- a statement that describes the organization’s imagined future and ultimate goals -- encourage your organization to create one. For instance, the above-mentioned eyeglass manufacturer’s vision statement might be, “To push optometry forward and ensure everyone can live a full life.”
   • Mission and vision statements should be stable and long-term fixtures within the organization, and not subject to frequent change.
2. 
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   Make a tally of your resources. Resources are not only financial assets. They also include staff, stockholders, volunteers, and partner agencies or organizations. Incorporate these resources into your strategy in order to give yourself a clearer picture of where you are and where you’re going. When writing your strategy, you should answer the following questions:

   • Who or what are your resources?
   • How can you better utilize your resources?
   • Are there resources you need, but do not have?
   • How can you obtain new resources?
3. 
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   Define your goals. Write about short-term and long-term goals. Where do you see the organization in six months? Where do you see the organization in five to ten years? Together, these two perspectives will gives you a broad outline of where you want to be and what will come next when you've successfully executed your strategy. When writing about the goals of the strategy, answer questions like:

   • How will the organization or business change or expand? Will the company or organization be leaner in five years, with fewer employees and less real estate? Or will it be larger than it is today?
   • What will the organization’s finances look in five to ten years? Use prior financial gains to make predictions about the future.
4. 
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   Confront obstacles to the strategy’s goals. Be as complete and honest as possible during this step. Even though it might hurt to confront the difficulties your business or organization faces, you can only move forward if you accept where you are. This part of the strategy should not only identify the obstacles to your organization, but also reflect on ways to overcome them.

   • How will the organization adapt to the changing market? If you’re in the museum world, for instance, you might need to address the fact that the number of museum visitors continues to drop each year.
   • Write a list of what stands in your way along with actions you can take to successfully overcome these obstacles.
   • Think about how to adjust marketing, payroll, sales figures and expenses.
5. 
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   Set specific goals. Set goals for each category and describe exactly what that category will look like when finished. For best results, a goal must be specific, quantifiable and reasonable.

   • Your goals should be quantifiable. For instance, a goal like "Increase sales by 10%" is a good goal because it is specific, and you can measure sales using actual data.
   • Recommend a timetable for each goal. For instance, you might say, “We should increase sales by 10% in the first quarter, and by another 10% in the second quarter.”
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Method 3

Method 3 of 3:

Thinking Broadly About Strategy

1. 
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   Identify what a strategy is. There are several terms similar and related to “strategy” that people often confuse. Before writing a strategy, it is important to understand your goals, tactics, and strategy.

   • A strategy defines where you are, where you want to be, and how you’ll get there.
   • The strategy is composed of tactics -- steps you can take to complete the plan. They explain how to move from where you are to where you want to be. Together, tactics explain a process for action.
   • Goals are the individual desired outcomes. The strategy might accomplish several goals, or just one.
2. 
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   Ask who you’re writing for. The first thing to do when writing a strategy -- or anything else -- is to figure out who you’re writing for. The audience you’re writing for will determine the language and content you use when writing the strategy.

   • For instance, if you’re writing an internal strategy for your marketing department, you will need to focus on marketing-related issues, problems, and concepts. You could use terminology and jargon specific to people inside the marketing industry, since they will be the ones reading it.
   • On the other hand, if you’re writing a strategy about how to devise a marketing strategy for a general audience, you will not necessarily be able to write a strategy that uses the same kind of language, since your audience will not be marketing insiders.
3. 
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   Set reasonable goals. Identify where you want to be in a “big picture” sense, then list a few specific goals in your strategy. Only set goals that can be reached with the resources available.

   • For a business strategy, this might be "increase advertising presence." For a home improvement project, it might be "paint the house on weekends."
   • Setting goals you can't reasonably reach is worse than not having a goal. Not only where you not end up where you want to be, you'll also be discouraged by your failure.
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   Devise your tactics. Once you have your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to get there. The tactics are the individual steps that compose a general strategy. Your tactics should be narrow, specific, and achievable. If you need help brainstorming what tactics can help you write your strategy, ask a colleague or a mentor (preferably one who has written a similar strategy).

   • If you’re writing a video game development strategy, for instance, talk to others who have written video game development strategies, or someone who has contributed to the development of a video game.
   • Create a plan for accomplishing each goal on time. Set a time frame for each goal based on realistic assumptions about the resources available and the length of time each goal will take to achieve.
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   Analyze obstacles, weaknesses, and threats. In this section, ask and answer, What could get in our way with this strategy? What could go wrong? Make a list of each potential threat, weakness, or obstacle. Include roadblocks to the company or industry as a whole, as well as difficulties related to specific steps.

   • For instance, a company that distributes movies to theaters might have to address the decline of the movie industry.
   • A weakness related to a specific strategy suggestion might be a lack of money to invest in new equipment.
6. 
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   Edit your written strategy. Once you’ve written your strategy, have someone else in your organization (or someone who is familiar with the topic of your strategy) proofread it for errors. They should not only correct basic errors like misspellings and incorrect punctuation, but also look for content or ideas that are unclear, incorrect, or missing.

   • Keep your writing clear and understandable for the reader. Be direct and avoid making vague statements.
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Tips

• It can be tempting to get into the specific details of each point in your strategic plan, but it's not necessarily a good idea. Those specific details of writing a strategy are actually part of tactics -- a finer-scale planning skill you get to once you've finished strategizing.
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