Marketing strategy gets sold by consultants as a document of substance and gravity. The truth is the opposite — the more useful it is, the shorter it tends to be. The fancy 40-page strategy decks make people feel like they got their money's worth; the four-page plan actually changes how the business spends its time.
The four pages
- Page 1 — Who we serve, and what we sell them. One paragraph per customer segment. Specific. "We sell HR software to Irish SMEs with 10–50 staff" beats "we serve the SME market." If you have three customer segments, that's three paragraphs.
- Page 2 — What's working, what's not. Two short lists. Channels, tactics, partnerships, content. Honest assessment based on the last 12 months. Be specific about numbers where you have them.
- Page 3 — What we'll do differently this year. Three to five concrete decisions. "Stop spending on Facebook Ads" is a decision. "Improve our brand presence" is not. Each decision should answer: who's responsible, by when, what does success look like.
- Page 4 — Budget and milestones. What gets spent where, what gets done by when. Quarterly milestones, not weekly tasks. The plan you'd be willing to defend to a board, written for an audience of your team.
What this isn't
- A SWOT analysis written once and forgotten.
- A "vision and mission" statement.
- A 60-slide deck of the marketing landscape.
- A 12-month content calendar with daily entries (those are tactics; tactics live below the strategy).
How long it takes to write
Two days. A rough draft after one focused day; a refined version after a second day's review with the founder, sales lead, and one front-line customer-facing team member. If you're paying a consultant to "facilitate," they should be done in three to five days. Strategy work that drags on for months is rarely strategy work — it's billing.
How often to redo it
Annually. With one quarterly review session — two hours, no decks, just "is this still right?" — to catch material changes. Most small Irish businesses fail not because their strategy was bad but because they wrote one and never reread it.
What to be sceptical of
- Strategy decks built without spending time with actual customers. Strategy without customer voice is decoration.
- Frameworks-for-frameworks-sake. SWOT, Porter's Five Forces, BCG matrix. Useful as classroom material; rarely useful as live decision frameworks for an SME.
- "AI-driven marketing strategy" pitches. AI can summarise a market in minutes. It cannot replace the judgement call about what your business should actually do — that requires knowing your team, customers, and capacity.
- Consultants who refuse to work in writing. A strategy you can't read and re-read is not a strategy.