Blog

With all the hype of ESPN’s The Last Dance, we figured we would spotlight Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the NBA’s greatest offensive strategy: the Triangle Offense.

The triangle offense is an offense strategy that combines perfect spacing with a series of actions based on player decisions resulting in a successful basketball offensive system. Head coach Phil Jackson won 11 NBA Finals with the triangle offense. The strategy has been considered the single most dominant offensive attack in any major sport over the past 25 years, and its principles can be applied to how your business implements its own strategies.

Phil Jackson and the GOAT, Michael Jordan.

The triangle offense as a whole is predicated on everyone knowing their roles and various skillsets. From a business context, all the players from leadership down to sales associates need to know the intricacies of their company’s strategy and how to best put it into play to support one another. This can prove challenging at times. Especially when your strategy may not be clearly defined.

Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls at one time didn’t have a clear and effective strategy.

The Bad Boy Detroit Pistons’ “Jordan Rules” was an effective strategy that defeated MJ’s Bulls in 6 games in 1989 and in 7 games in 1990. Finally, in 1991, the Bulls defeated the Pistons in the playoffs, neutralizing the Jordan Rules with their newly installed triangle offense. The Bulls went from a team that focused on Michael Jordan as its primary offensive option to a team that became unpredictable with its ball movement and offensive sets, and the rest is history.

How the Los Angeles Lakers implemented Jackson’s triangle offense.

Often times, businesses have to reposition their strategy in order to continue to grow, just like the Bulls.

At Schiffbauer Consulting Group, we help clients by leading ideation sessions, improving their processes and designing roadmaps with measurable goals and disruptive results.

We’ve guided businesses in over a dozen industries and have the tools to change the confidence and the game plan for your organization. Just like Phil Jackson.

When you partner to grow your business with Schiffbauer Consulting Group, you benefit from working with a team of expert content, design, and strategy professionals. We bring in the Steve Kerrs and Dennis Rodmans to get it done on the court for you.

Whether you’re looking to take the next step, or the first step, let us help you spark the potential of your business today.

Pass us the rock and start your business’s three-peat with us.

Business owners do not have to sit around and play victim during troubling times. In periods of uncertainty, where your dollars go matter more than ever and all marketing efforts ought to be measured for return on investment per marketing channel and further evaluated for effectiveness when measured against one enough.

If you are not measuring your efforts, you need to develop ways to do so or work with a trusted partner to help you make more sense of your marketing.

Let’s dive into how you can develop a winning marketing plan that’s actionable:

Have S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Implementing smart strategies start with having them align to the S.M.A.R.T. principle:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant, and
• Time-based

Before you set out to conduct any marketing campaign, your goal should be clearly defined and understood by those working on it.

Let’s say you want to double your revenue through expanding what your business does digitally, you have to have a more specific goal than simply “doubling more revenue”.

To make this goal SMART, give a time span, specifics relevant to tasks associated with the goal, and ensure that it is measurable.

Here’s a great example of how to go about this intended goal:

“Through a digital marketing campaign, our company’s goal is to double online revenue in six months by investing in a mix of paid and organic channels, focusing primarily on Google Ads and Facebook Ads based on previous return on ad spend data.”

The above example goal outlines a measurable period of time, and will use relevant and attainable data and tactics to get it done.

Review your current channels and marketing ROI

In general, if you intend to make money from a marketing channel, it’s important that you measure and assess your strategy based on that specific channel’s benchmark metrics, specifically return on investment (ROI), or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), where applicable.

This is particularly important in the digital marketing era, because all efforts can be readily tracked, including customer conversions or costs associated with lead generation strategies. If you are unable to track these particular areas currently, we’d advise you to partner with a consulting group like Schiffbauer Consulting Group to understand your goals and help you achieve them.

When it comes to the digital space, your first mission before even spending a dollar should be to optimize your website prior to sending any paid traffic to it. With this, you will want to ensure proper analytics are set up to track customer interactions throughout all campaigns. Once you have campaigns running and know your analytics, you can use that data, paired with monthly revenue data, to estimate the conversion rate you aim to earn with your future campaign efforts.

Implementing a winning strategy

Once you have an idea of your current returns across your marketing channels, have set reasonable revenue goals, and have outlined methods to optimize your efforts, you have to put these strategies in action.

When you’re building a paid internet marketing campaign in particular, keep in mind that every step in your plan should be based on revenue goals. If they are not, you are essentially throwing money away. If you’re going to use Facebook Ads as part of your campaign, for example, it should be understood by all key stakeholders on why that method will help you reach your revenue goal.

Even in the year 2020 and as accessible as these tactics are, paid digital marketing efforts are not being fully leveraged by small businesses. And it’s not their fault or your own fault for that matter if you feel like this may be foreign to you.

Traditional marketing agencies and companies that “sell-off” one particular marketing service have not educated you on why it is important to have a measurable marketing mix that can be tracked for return on investment. These entities want to sell you on their way, and more often than not, it is not the right way. Between sending vanity analytics monthly with no measurable context to selling you on bulk impressions, these firms are not looking out for your best interests.

At Schiffbauer Consulting Group, we work with our clients to understand their business, its problems, in order to provide solutions that will differentiate your business. In troubling times, you need a partner that you can trust. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions on building a winning marketing plan for your business.

Luxury goods chain Barneys, which has been in business since 1923, will close all of its stores including its flagship Manhattan store if it can’t find a buyer by tomorrow, October 24th.

CEO Daniella Vitale is on record stating that, “Like many in our industry, Barneys New York’s financial position has been dramatically impacted by the challenging retail environment and rent structures that are excessively high relative to market demand.”

Bullshit. Retail as we know it is dead and no, us Millennials didn’t kill it.

October 2016, I remember it being a muggy fall morning in High Point, North Carolina. I was in transit from my former start-up’s trade show booth at High Point Market to a shoddy conference room where I wanted to attend a seminar on digital best practices for growing furniture based businesses.

Everyone else in attendance looked as if they could have been my Mother or Grandfather, and the speaker only shared very granule baseline statistics and conjectures with the audience. From having a Google Business Page to making sure you share content consistency on Facebook, these strategies were not going to exponentially grow the businesses of the attendees; regardless if they thought so or not.

The truth is, the “Retail Apocalypse” is merely a scapegoat for the following: Shopping behavior of the 21st Century Consumer has radically changed from the 20th Century Shopper and will only continue to do so.

Here are the facts:

• The amount of time that people shop has fallen nearly 20% since the 1960s and the “Golden Era” of advertising.

• Today, people spend nearly 50% of their day being spent in front of a screen; something that was nonexistent in the 1960s.

• The amount of time people spend online has more than doubled since 2008. The way we go online has also shifted from a desktop to mobile device focus since then.   

• To make matters more interesting is that the little thing in our pocket that we call a cellphone receives close to 50 notifications a day.

Technology has not only reshaped our society, but it is reshaping media, retail and how we behave and interact with both.

Since 2008, social media has become a prevalent force in our day-to-day lives. At its core social media is a catalyst for inspiration and discovery; regardless if we’re looking for new sneakers or memes.

Getting a message through to customers, and not just in front of their eyes for a split second before being fed to the trash can takes some radical rethinking in today’s marketplace.

What will ultimately save some retailers through all this noise is that us Millennials have FOMO big time.

69% of Millennials admit to experiencing Fear of Missing Out and their spending patterns reflect a shift away from goods and services to events and experiences (Shout-out to McKinsey on the cool statistic).

In fact, this fear doesn’t just plague Millennials, McKinsey has also found that “experience spending” across all generations has increased significantly. Money spent on live events from the US consumer has jumped 70% over the past 30 years.

Ok, what does this all mean for retail?

Experiential marketing and strategies that disrupt your respective market niche need to be in your playbook for 2020 and onward.

The best companies on earth are already implementing this by creating a uniform customer experience.

Think Apple. You go into Apple, and you are immersed into an experience that is a technological playground paired with excellent levels of customer service from all those Blue shirts running around asking how they can help you. You have droves of people WAITING for new product launches once they are notified on Instagram. The Apple experience is uniform from their physical retail fronts to even ordering product online after the fact. Apple’s physical retail presence focuses on effectively communicating and engaging the consumer; not necessarily selling to them. New retail is building brand loyalty and customer trust, not just getting 20% off.

The right product, in the right place, at the right price is no longer relevant in today’s retail landscape.

Retailers must reach consumers where changing behaviors lead new channels and new experiences that drive new insight into consumer behaviors, preferences and expectations.

If you wish to better understand your customer in today’s retail world, feel free to further contact us, as we exist to break through the noise in your market.