Digital marketing and strategy: The questions

A strategy that starts with channels instead of a problem is a service list. This question shows whether anyone looked at your business or opened a template.

Read the first page of the strategy. If you swap in another company name and the text still holds, it was not written for you.

Every forecast rests on assumptions. When they are not written down, the number looks like a fact but is an opinion with a decimal point.

Pick the largest number in the document and ask what happens if it is half that. If the whole plan collapses, the plan is fragile.

This is the question that separates judgement from a catalogue. Every business has limited budget and attention. A strategy with nothing excluded made no decisions at all.

Count the channels in the document. If there are more than three for the first six months, ask who executes them and with what budget.

The most common ending for a good strategy is a drawer. If nobody can execute it, the document is a cost with no result, however good it is.

Take the first task in the plan and hand it to the person who will do it. If they cannot tell what is being asked, the plan is not executable in your company.

A strategy with no stop condition can never officially fail, which is why it keeps absorbing budget. This question is the fuse.

Put the stop condition in your calendar with a date. On that date check it, whatever the conversation says.

A strategy without research is an opinion with a cover, and the price difference between the two is exactly this work.

Ask how many of your customers they will talk to. Zero is an answer that says everything about the method.

"Competitor analysis" without a list and criteria usually means looking at three websites for one afternoon.

Ask for the competitor list in advance and add one they missed. The reaction is the test.

A customer portrait invented in a meeting room leads everything after it in the wrong direction.

Ask: which of this do we know and which do we assume. A good document makes that distinction by itself.

The allocation is the strategy itself: the numbers per channel are the decisions, everything else is preamble.

For every line ask one question: why this and not half of it. The answer should be arithmetic, not conviction.

If "results" are not defined before the start, in three months everyone will call something different a result.

Pick one indicator and ask: where exactly will I see this number and how is it calculated. A vague answer now is a dispute later.

An unspecified format breeds disappointment: you expect an execution plan, you receive a presentation of principles.

Ask for the document’s table of contents in advance: just the section titles. One page that aligns expectations.

A strategy needs your data, your people and your decisions, and unannounced involvement turns into waiting and then into an excuse.

Ask how many hours of your time the whole process will cost. An answer under an hour means nobody will ask you anything, which is worse.

A plan is a hypothesis, and the attitude to contradicting data separates method from stubbornness.

Ask for an example where they changed their own strategy because of data. Whoever has no example has no method.

A strategy that brings more enquiries than you can serve produces disappointed customers instead of growth.

Do the maths yourself: if enquiries double next year, who handles them. If there is no answer, tell the strategist now.

Without order and dates a strategy is a wish list, and the order is half of the decision.

Look at month one of the calendar. More than three new things in it means the plan was written for a team you do not have.

Questions begin at execution, and a strategist who disappears after handover leaves the document an orphan.

Ask what one hour of consultation costs after handover. No answer means no afterwards was planned.