Why does your company need strategy workshops?

You run a company and want to grow it. You’re planning to launch a new product and wondering how to go about it. The way you always have? By following your business instincts? Or maybe by watching what your competitors do?

Our tip: create a good communication strategy, and make strategy workshops with a creative agency your first step.

Does your company need a strategy?

Yes. Every business needs a strategy, understood as defining a vision and setting the goal the company wants to reach. The same goes for a communication strategy.

To establish itself in the market and reach customers with its products, every brand should have its own approach and a plan for doing it. It should know who to talk to, how and where.

Strategy workshops are the first step toward creating a plan for good, effective communication with your customers.

What do you gain from a workshop?

• First: you’ll realize how important it is to know your customer, which means getting to know them, observing them and designing with them, their actions and their feelings in mind.
• Second: you’ll test your assumptions against reality. You’ll look at your company, project or product from a new perspective.
• Third: you’ll tackle questions that are key to growing your company or product, the ones that may be “obvious to everyone on our team” but have never been seriously discussed. As a result, surprising issues to solve may come up during the workshop, and not just ones about your communication strategy.
• Fourth: you’ll save time. You’ll avoid endless discussions, conversations, meetings and explanations of your business assumptions. A workshop, including the time spent preparing for it, is the most efficient way to share knowledge with an agency. Plus, as we work together, you’ll get to know not only how the agency works but also its people.
• Fifth: with your team working alongside our specialists, you’ll gain tangible benefits. We describe them below.

Tangible benefits of the workshop

• Communication foundations: we’ll lay solid groundwork for your brand’s communication. We’ll set goals and a long-term vision, and map out the stages of making it happen over time.
• Brand differentiators: we’ll identify your brand’s real differentiators and create an effective plan for making use of them.
• Customer insight: we’ll establish who your customers are, what they’re looking for and what they expect. We’ll show you what to do to win them over, keep them and build their loyalty to your brand.
• Communication processes: we’ll streamline your current communication processes or build them from scratch.
• Measuring results (KPIs): we’ll agree on how to measure the effectiveness of your communication and sales activities.

How do we run our workshops?

The word “workshop” brings work to mind: a place to work and the tools to do it. And that’s exactly what each of our strategy workshops is: many hours of work by many people. It’s not an ordinary meeting that’s all talk, or a euphoric “brainstorm.”

A workshop has its own structure (assumptions, timing, methodology) designed to achieve the goals set for it. We run our workshops using our own format. Put simply, they consist of three parts.

Stage 1: we plan the agenda and program

We get ready to work together. We ask you to send us information about your company and industry, and to share your company materials. We learn the specifics of your sector and its players, do market research and analyze the challenges we’ll face when implementing the project.

Stage 2: we work together, workshop-style

Who from your company should take part in the workshop? Members of the management board, the project manager and employees who deal with customers (from sales, the contact center and other teams).

We meet in person, usually away from your office, or online. We work together for one day, ideally two, using a range of approaches. We use design thinking and service design methods, hold discussions and work with workshop tools such as the Business Model Canvas and the Service Blueprint (worksheets that take us through each task in turn).

These proven methods help us learn more about each other and work out solutions. We use them creatively, taking each brand’s individual needs into account. We write down ideas (all of them!), observations, conclusions and questions.

Stage 3: we prepare a summary

After each workshop, we create a knowledge compendium: a kind of summary of everything we’ve worked out together. In it, you’ll find proposed solutions, our recommendations for your company’s or product’s communication strategy, and a sample action timeline.

Why do we recommend strategy workshops?

We’ve completed more than 350 projects and tried out different ways of working together. We know that when we start with a workshop, we reach the expected results faster.

It’s also the best first step toward the next stages: creating an action plan or a communication strategy, designing communication materials, and launching and running a marketing campaign.

For us, the workshop is always a key moment in working together. We know that running marketing communications without getting to know your company in depth is a perfect recipe for misunderstandings, frustration and needlessly burning time and money on both sides.

Want to create a good communication strategy for your company? We’ll be glad to help and run a strategy workshop for your team. Write to us and tell us about the challenge your company is facing.