How To Run a Marketing Strategy Workshop the Right Way

We’ve already faffed on for long enough, so we’ll cut the formalities and get straight to the meat of the matter.

The eight steps on how to run a marketing strategy workshop á la Growth Gurus.

Here it is in TL;DR format:

And here it is in all its glorious details:

Step 1 – Prepare for the workshop

There’s nothing like preparation.

Benjamin Franklin (a guy that knew his stuff) famously said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

So take a tip out of his playbook and apply it to your marketing workshops.

After all, this kind of thinking landed him on the 100-dollar bill. Think of what it could do to your strategy sessions.

But seriously, how should you prepare for running a marketing strategy workshop?

Cover off these six sub-points (loosely based on IDOARRT), and you’ll be strutting into your session with confidence:

1. Set a marketing strategy workshop goal
2. Assess the status quo
3. Review your customer personas
4. Look at your competitors
5. Prepare an agenda
6. Finalise the attendee list and gather pre-meeting feedback

1. Set a marketing strategy workshop goal

The first thing you need to do is set an overall goal for the session.

If you’re not clear why you’re scheduling a workshop, how will it ever be a success?

In our experience, sessions without clear objectives quickly devolve into unrelated and unproductive conversations that leave your team feeling demoralised and poorly led.

So sit down and write a short yet precise goal statement for your meeting.

2. Assess the status quo

Your workshop doesn’t exist in a parallel universe.

It’s firmly rooted in your company’s overarching values and objectives.

So before the meeting, spend a little time painting an accurate picture of what’s going on, even if you’re planning on transforming business-as-usual.

3. Review your customer personas

90% of companies have some sort of customer personas already built out.

Document your findings.

You’ll need them in the workshop because you cannot do anything marketing-related without a crystal-clear picture of your target audience.

What if your company doesn’t have personas?

No need to worry — simply create a rough sketch of what you think they should be and use the workshop to get consensus from key stakeholders.

Step 2 – Start the workshop with impact

The day of the workshop has finally come around.

You’re feeling well-prepped, and your attendees know what to expect.

So far, so good.

Everyone comes into the meeting room and sits down. You stand up.

You know this is your only chance to set the scene for the workshop.

Step 3 – Revolve your discussions around the customer

As the workshop’s facilitator and a marketer, you have a vital role to play.

You need to keep everyone focused on the customer.

Internal debates are bound to pop up when you bring together so many different players from across the organisation.

Maybe the sales and marketing guys start discussing the CRM workflows. Maybe the Head of Retail goes off on a tangent about how they receive the offers from the promotions team.

These are details, and they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Remember this is a strategy meeting, and you have limited time.

It’s your job to cut these conversations short or redirect them back to the customer.

A good tactic is to ask yourself, “Is this something our target customers would care about?”

If the answer is no, shut it down.

Step 4 – Get creative as hell

You might feel a little like a dictator when you’re closing down discussions and pushing the conversation back towards the original plan.

Luckily, that’s not your main role.

Your key objective for the day is to create an energising safe space where people feel comfortable enough to say even the craziest things that come to mind. After all, you’re here to rethink everything you’ve done so far.

Nothing innovative has ever been invented by people afraid to take risks.

Imagine how the average Joe looked at Steve Jobs when he told them that people would be using an Apple to run their businesses in less than a decade?

Dumbfounded, to say the least.

But the people in Steve’s workshops didn’t bat an eyelid and supported his crazy ideas. The rest is history as we type away on a Macbook Pro.

So how can you encourage intense creativity?

1. Run the workshop in a well-illuminated, external environment that physically breaks the attendees away from their usual habits
2. Make everyone feel relaxed and welcomed — never put anyone down and be willing to say crazy things to prove this is a safe space for creativity
3. Avoid groupthink by allowing individuals to be individuals — try solo exercises and anonymous voting systems
4. Regularly break down into smaller groups and get people to present the group’s findings — then swap groups at the next exercise
5. Use the principle of gamestorming to get people to think differently and collaboratively about common issues
6. Provide healthy snacks (like Nakd bars)

Just remember you’ll have to remind the participants of marketing constraints — there’s no point going down a rabbit hole if an idea isn’t viable due to budget, time, or technology restrictions.

Step 5 – Tie your marketing strategy into the overall strategy

Your company’s C-level executives spend all their time thinking about high-level strategy.

And since they’re the guys and gals that run the show, you’d be daft to ignore them.

They won’t sign off on a marketing strategy if it doesn’t align with their thoughts.

Which is why, earlier on, we suggested you should invite your CEO and CMO to your session.

But even if they can’t make it, you can’t allow your session to go off in a completely different direction.

Rather:

1. Sit down with them separately
2. Get executive buy-in on your workshop’s agenda before you waste everybody’s day
3. Make sure you remind your attendees of the overall strategy in the session

Step 6 – Don’t get derailed

Did you know that 56% of meetings are considered unproductive by employees and that off-topic conversations are consistently reported as the biggest challenge in meetings?

Off-topic conversations are the bane of workshops.

They ruin the flow of ideas. They waste time. And they have a massive impact on outcomes.

Consider this example:

You’re running a marketing workshop with 5 attendees on an average hourly wage of €50.

A key participant brings up an issue with your ERP system and talks about it for 5 minutes.

This throws everybody off their rhythm, and you lose about 15 minutes before you get back on track. Nothing major, right?

Think again, that digression cost the company €937.50 and forced you to remove 15 precious minutes from the time you allocated to discussing the action plan.

Ouch.

Step 7 – Document literally everything

The human brain is an extraordinary tool. It is a creative masterpiece.

And it basks in the freedom of thought provided by a well-executed workshop.

But the mind has a flaw we tend to downplay and forget about…

Our lacklustre memory.

Within just one short hour, people forget about half of the information presented in a meeting. And that number shoots up to 90% after a week goes by.

No wonder intelligent documentation is pivotal to a workshop’s success.

It sets everything you discussed into stone and provides you with a foolproof record of the topics you mentioned and the magical ideas attendees brought up.

If you document the workshop intelligently, You won’t need to worry about anything slipping through the cracks or participants having later disagreements about what was agreed.

Step 8 – End on a high note and create a follow-up plan

Have you ever heard about the serial position effect?

It’s a psychological principle that describes how people recall the first and last things more vividly than those in the middle.

This mental trick explains why the start and end are soooo important.

Be it a speech, an advert, or a marketing strategy meeting.

And since we’ve already covered how to start a workshop, we’ll only worry about how to end one in this section.

The best way to finish off a session is by:

1. Mentioning something inspirational (like a vision of the future)
2. Providing a solid summary of what you’ve covered (to elevate the key points out of the “stuck-in-the-middle” mist)
3. Pulling together a follow-up plan with SMART goals and clear owners
4. Asking the participants for feedback on a 1-to-10 scale (and why if they score you less than an 8) to demonstrate you’re committed to leading better workshops
5. Repeating these three points in an email within 24 hours of finishing

This third point, the roadmap, is particularly crucial because it’s the first step towards your new marketing strategy.

It’s, in all essence, the reason you sat down and ran the workshop in the first place.

If you slip up here and your workshop doesn’t lead to change, it’ll be considered a failure.

Now pat yourself on the back.

You’ve just learned how to run a marketing strategy session, and your upcoming workshop is going to be a great success!

1. Make sure everyone has video capabilities

Your attendees will be hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart. And distance has a natural ability to disrupt creativity and collaboration.

Unless you cheat it by using high-quality, lag-free video.

You should invest in a high-res webcam and a giant screen for the meeting room, and a good quality laptop for all your remote colleagues and collaborators.

Pro tip: ask the participants to keep the video and audio throughout the marketing strategy meeting (even during individual activities) to replicate the feel of being together.

2. Create digital workspaces in advance

You can’t rely on whiteboards (or blackboards if you’re even more retro).

We use Miro in our meetings, and we think it’s fantastic.

The only word of warning is that you need to create your workspaces in advance — don’t do it on the fly, or you’ll get stuck in some minor detail and lose your participants’ attention.

3. Give each participant their own workspace

Make your virtual meeting as close to real-life as possible.

Each attendee should have a private workspace (like the paper on their desk), and the room should have a shared one (like the whiteboard at the front of the room).

If you’re running a hybrid meeting, pop the shared whiteboard on the telly and ask your in-person attendees to use a digital workspace to show solidarity for their poor colleagues stuck on a beach in Australia.

Another pro tip: give each participant a different colour for their virtual sticky notes, so you can “gamestorm” more efficiently in your eWorkshops.

4. Run the timer, always

Virtual meetings tend to get boring faster than traditional ones. Probably because you can’t feel the shared energy in the room.

This makes it all the more important to stay on track and on time.

Luckily, meeting software gives you a Messi-like assist — obnoxious timers.

Just pop one on the virtual whiteboard, and nobody can run over.

5. Set up digital polling

Voting and building consensus are major activities in a strategic marketing meeting.

You can’t do without them.

But you don’t need to rely on asking people to lower their webcams and raise their hands; you can set up digital polling and have anyone from anywhere log their preference effortlessly

6. Test your tech setup

And do it well before the meeting, for god’s sake!

Nothing’s worse (exaggeration alert) than showing up to a workshop and battling it out with technology.

You won’t win, and your participants will think you’re an amateur. Not good.

And that’s it. You’re ready.