From the moment your fingers touch your keyboard, to the endless, tiring hours that your pour your heart and soul into strategising and pondering what your next marketing move is going to be, writing a marketing strategy is an arduous task, but a necessary one.

Marketing strategies mean so many things to so many different people, that there is no standard code - or is there? While I have been using the same marketing strategy format for the past 20 years, I am always alarmed when I see a sales person write up a marketing 'to do list' and proclaim that this is in fact their marketing strategy. Likewise, when an entrepreneur hires a college graduate who writes up a marketing strategy based on the format that they learnt at college, which is out-dated, lacking in relevance and most likely not something that the student has had the ability to actually learn in-depth.

When I first decided to build a AI-based marketing technology platform, I was completely and utterly sure that this was going to be the ride of my life. And it is. Without doubt, it is the best business adventure I have ever had, but it comes with a lot of work, a wild imagination and some technical jargon.

It's mid-way through February and many companies are looking for the secret sauce that this going to make this quarter and the next their biggest yet. You can drill it into your sales people and lure them with a carrot. Cutting costs is always a good way to increase your profits and of course there is marketing. Most marketing departments know what they need to do, but they don't always get around to doing it in the timeframe needed to reach the goals of a company.

As a 20-year entrepreneur, I have learned a few things over the years and some things I have had to learn repetitively until I 'got it'. Learning should be embraced they say, and I agree wholeheartedly but sometimes when you are in the thick of it, it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel let alone the 'why' you needed to learn that lesson again and again.

Over the past few months, Marketing Eye has hosted hundreds of marketing workshops. There have been many reasons for that, but mostly, companies are keen to start 2019 off strong. To do that, they need to get all of their key people in one room (or on one call) and go through their business objectives, sales goals and marketing activities for the year ahead.

Imagine your sales team sitting in your office discussing the reasons why they didn't make the sales projections for the last quarter. They talk about how hard they have worked, and that they think it is either bad time of year, or something has changed in the market. Furthermore, they say to you that they think your marketing is either not effective or worse, non-existent.

Every business needs a 'marketing eye', and with that comes the basics: a marketing strategy, a marketing implementation plan, analytics and KPI's and of course, results.

Reinventing your marketing team should be a thing that all companies do on a yearly basis. Keeping everyone on their toes, but more importantly encouraging everyone to stay relevant is critical to your company's success. If your marketing team doesn't have their heart in it and are not determined to be successful, then you may see that written in red in your balance sheet.