Simple Marketing & Brand Planning PDF
Single page strategies for the win.Hey Everyone,
OGSM — What the hell is that right? Well in marketing speak, it’s a simple acronym to help you break down and understand your marketing and brand plans.
For most organizations, it’s not a lack of creativity and ideas. You have those in spades. The bottleneck comes in producing those ideas. Making them come to life while not losing steam.
The OGSM way of looking at big ideas breaks them down in a way that they become tangible and realistic.
An OGSM framework is a business planning tool that helps organizations, teams, and individuals define and link their long-term visions to short-and medium-term goals and activities.
OGSM
The acronym stands for: Objectives + Goal + Strategy + Measurement
Objective – a clearly written, short statement of what the organization wants to achieve.
Goals – describe what success should look like.
Strategies – sets out how you will achieve your goals. (Not to be confused with organizational strategy).
Measures – how you will monitor the delivery of your strategies.
So WHY an OGSM? What’s its purpose?
Codify annual objectives thus making them more manageable.
Ensure all objectives are quantifiable and measurable. We don’t want to be wasting time, resources, and money on objectives that serve no purpose.
Ensure all tactics derive from a specific, aligned-to strategy. Nothing worse than being tactic happy with no real rhyme or reason.
Prioritize strategies and tactics so you can properly allocate resources and money.
Define what we ARE choosing to do.
Define what ARE NOT choosing to do.
So, let’s dive deeper.
Objectives
First, think about your main objective. What do you want or need to achieve? And how, at a high level, do you expect to do this?
From this, you need to create a very clear, concise statement of your objective. This needs to be more than a vague "I want us to be the best." It should be a statement to focus your thinking, it should be emotionally attractive, and it should briefly state how you're going to do what you want to do.
For example, imagine you're a marketing manager with a non-profit organization. Your objective statement might be, "to rank #1 in our local area for XYZ expertise" or “to sell out our Gala event 2 weeks faster than previous years.
This sets you up nicely to put actionable goals around the objective, breaking it down so it isn’t a giant mountain but a small hill instead.
Goals
Once you have your objective in place, set out quantitative results of what success will look like. In other words, what needs to be done to ensure you meet your objective?
These are your goals, and you'll typically need to set three or four of them to describe success. Be sure to make them SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
To return to our example, your goals might be:
Within the next 3 months, develop a PR plan to have local publications do a media blitz giving visibility to the Gala event.
Within the next 3 months, develop a social media plan to highlight all the sponsors and donors.
Within the next 3 months, get on 5 local podcasts to create evergreen content for this year, and subsequent years’ events.
Within the next 3 months, develop an influencer campaign to leverage the power of compound social to drive awareness and ticket sales.
Strategy
When you've established your objectives and goals, your next step is to outline how you will achieve them. These are your strategies, and you should aim to identify three to five that will ensure you reach your goals.
Sticking with our fictional non-profit GALA event, your strategies might be:
Setting up a well-resourced, dynamic PR team that is capable of running an accelerated public relations program for bringing massive exposure.
Develop and resource your social media team to create a robust content calendar making sure to always drive traffic back to the landing page.
Create a podcast 1-sheet and distribute it to the top 50 local podcasts for additional exposure and evergreen content
Develop an influencer program strategy including incentives, posting requirements, and engagement ideas.
Measurement
How you measure progress depends on the strategies you are trying to deliver. But, in all cases, it's good to bear the following questions in mind when developing them:
Are our strategies working?
Are we going to meet our goals?
Can we realistically achieve our objectives and vision within the expected timeframe?
Lots of strategy professionals suggest using dashboards to visualize progress on quantitative measures, and action plans to measure step-by-step progress toward your strategies.
They also suggest bringing the OGSM elements together into a "one-page marketing plan," which quickly and concisely communicates the plan to everyone involved.
