Your marketing strategy should fit on 1 page

Marketing is a field that gets every day more and more complex. Every day there are new tools that you should master. There are new challenges to overcome and new expectations to fulfill. In this world of constant change, your marketing strategy must be agile. It must be quick to update and fast to understand for your partners.

Why classical marketing strategies fail

Classical Marketing strategies are extreme documents that have dozens and dozens of pages.

The format issue

The form of these strategic documents is a trap. You usually want your strategy to be as detailed as possible. So, it can take into account every finesse of this new complex world. But by doing it in long form documents you make it impossible for your strategy to be quickly updated. You can’t adapt your strategy to the latest trends or user testing results. Your strategy is so hard to update that in the end you just maintain it. You aren’t agile anymore.

The time issue

The second problem you face with strategies described in a dozen of pages is time. Your team and partners will need to take a lot of time to understand it fully. The form of your strategy makes it spread and adoption slower.

The tools for a changing world

At Enigma, we explore and prototype new ways to create and spread marketing strategies. The requirements are simple. We need tools that make it possible to give a complete view of a strategy in just one page. Yes, one page. If your marketing strategy fits in one page you can update much more easily than a long document. Also, a one-page document is, of course, quicker to read. Therefore it’s also quicker to understand. And finally, such a document has more chances to be spread. Because let’s be honest, nobody likes to lose precious time reading a 30 pages document. Even more, if we could summarize this document in one simple page.

Here two tools we use that fit this specific requirement. They helped us run marketing campaigns with great agility.

The Marketing Map

The Marketing Map brings together all the pillars of a marketing strategy in one framework. The building blocks of the framework are the following ones:

1. Goals


2. Value proposition


3. Story


4. Measures


5. KPI

The strength of this tool is that it gives a complete briefing on a marketing strategy. And this in just one page. Another strength of this tool is that it puts the story in the center. Each element has to fit the story (or the ‘why’ if you take Simon’s Sinek Model). This pushes you to create a concept that is easily spreadable because it is based only on one core idea.

We built this framework to show the dialogue between elements:

• From the goals on the top, you should take out the KPI at the bottom


• From the value proposition in the left, you should be able to generate the measures on the right

Because of this “dialogue”, your team understands better the holistic view of a campaign. They are able to double check if all elements are necessary. If one element isn’t interconnected with one of the other sides then there is a problem.

The Strategy Map

The Strategy Map shows the interaction of each measure with the other. With these visual links, we ensure that each measure is absolutely necessary. As for the Marketing Map, if in your Strategy Map there is a measure that isn’t connected to the whole ecosystem, then you know that you should kill it.

The Strategy Map is a powerful method. It highlights the interaction between the measures. It enables you to see the many customer journey that can exist in your ecosystem. By using a Strategy Map you come out of the conversion funnel thinking. You see the real path that people can take.

When we use the Strategy Map we tell the stories of these customer journeys. By doing so we can check if:

• the journey will make sense for the user (from here where can we go?)


• we lead the user to our goal that we previously defined in the Marketing Map


• we use the full potential of each measure (which data from this measure can be used for another measure?)

Challenge your strategy

Can your strategy fit in one page? Try out these two tools to challenge your marketing strategy. If you can’t make your strategy fit on one page then ask yourself why. Is it because you want to do too much? Then cut out a few measures. Is the strategy too complex? Then simplify it.