You sit down to brainstorm with your team about your marketing strategy, and people come up with great ideas. The creative energy flows and the sky’s the limit. Toward the end of the meeting, you start to talk about how you’ll turn these ideas into reality.
This is common practice with most organizations—and it’s all wrong!
The Dangers of Forgetting Technology
When people start strategizing, especially about communication or delivery methods, there’s a tendency to think about traditional or tried-and-true ideas. But there’s a real danger in coming up with a great plan and then considering the technical tools you’ll need at the end. With this approach, you either need to retrofit the technology to fit the plan, or compromise the plan to line up with the technology.
Planning first and thinking about technology second means you’re making the plan in a vacuum without knowing if your goals are feasible and failed plans can negatively affects the bottom line.
Technology At The Table
For your company to grow and thrive, technology needs to have a place at the table during the entire planning, strategy and execution phases of a project.
Think about how technology fits in as you form a strategy and see where it can help drive it. Make sure you have tech experts close by and ask them: is this realistic? Few business owners think naturally about technology, but engaging tech experts in your conversation allows you to dream big, identify opportunities, and understand whether technology can make those dreams possible.
A lack of understanding of what is or is not possible in technology will sometimes change the strategy conversation completely. People often make plans based on assumptions about what is possible—plans that sometimes need a complete overhaul once they understand what the technology allows.
Brave New World
The tech world is constantly changing in challenging and exciting ways. If your strategy team includes people who are up-to-date on technology, your company has the potential to actually execute exciting new strategies – not just to imagine them. You have the opportunity to create practical strategies that will slingshot you ahead of your competition, if you can alter your mindset about technology.
People tend to think of technology as operational infrastructure rather than a solution. In reality, technology can do a lot to bridge gaps in your business where other approaches can’t. So use it to to discover how to bring your business to the next level.
