What Is the Importance and Benefits of a Strategy?

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Companies and organizations of all sizes and across virtually every industry rely on strategic planning as a way to assess their business, set a vision and goals for the future, create an action plan for achieving those goals, and more. Ask the leaders of any successful organization about the importance of strategic planning, and they’ll likely tell you how much it helps keep their company on track while enabling them to unlock opportunities for growth. 

This blog is all about strategic planning, why you should be doing it, and—perhaps most importantly—how to do it well. To keep things tidy, we’ll be answering the following three questions:

• What is strategic planning?
• What is the importance of strategic planning?
• What are the benefits of strategic planning?

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What Is Strategic Planning?

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Strategic planning describes a process through which the leaders of a company or organization define their vision for the future. Additionally, strategic planning involves defining the specific goals, objectives, and milestones they’ll need to achieve along the way. In other words, the foundation of strategic planning centers around answering two high-level questions: 

• What do we want (or need) to achieve?
• How are we going to do it?

As the process unfolds, more specific items can be addressed and accounted for, like setting timelines and milestones, assigning responsibilities, and tracking progress and status updates.

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Why Strategic Planning Is Important

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Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve, the primary importance of business strategy and strategic planning is that it provides a framework and process for growth. Depending on what’s needed, strategic planning can play a pivotal role in a wide range of organizational goals, such as helping to:

• Develop and implement strategies for growing brand recognition.
• Expand into a new location or market, and track related growth/progress.
• Increase customer satisfaction and transform loyal customers into brand advocates.
• Attract new investors, and keep them satisfied.
• Develop new products or services—as well as rollout and marketing plans.

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The Key Benefits of Strategic Planning

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When done well, strategic planning can bring about meaningful, even transformational, changes to a business and how it operates. Among the most compelling benefits of strategic planning is its potential to increase market share and profitability, provide a sense of direction, drive operational efficiency, improve decision making, and develop resiliency.

1. Increasing market share and profitability: The time you spend with strategic planning is rarely ever wasted—after all, the more you know and understand, the better positioned your team will be to take the right actions to drive results. One common objective of strategic planning is increasing market share and profitability. By bringing the right information and perspectives together—including insights into what your competitors are doing—meaningful objectives can be identified and, ultimately, achieved.
2. Providing a sense of direction: Misunderstandings can really impede progress, especially when an organization is trying to set sensible objectives and develop plans for achieving them. Engaging in a structured strategic planning process helps keep everyone on the same page -  motivated and ready to work together to drive positive outcomes.
3. Driving operational efficiency: Strategic planning helps to not only set meaningful goals, but to prioritize them by importance and track their progress, as well. When everyone in the organization has their targets set on the same, shared objectives, they can collaborate more effectively and efficiently. 
4. Improving decision-making: Setting clear, achievable objectives with defined benefits and benchmarks helps everyone to make better—and better-informed—decisions. When strategic plans are developed in great enough detail, it becomes easy to prioritize and de-prioritize what needs to happen for the strategy to succeed. Strategic planning is an effective way to turn ambiguous goals into concrete, actionable processes for business growth or improvement.
5. Developing resiliency: When they can work from a solid, clear plan, business teams are in a better position to recognize and adapt to any variables that could otherwise unravel progress and leave an organization unsure how to proceed. Some companies will devote a decent amount of their strategic planning to anticipating challenges and developing ideas of how to respond to them, should they arise.

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How Does Elate Elevate Strategic Planning?

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It’s important to understand that not all strategic plans are created equally. When developing a strategic plan, the S.M.A.R.T. objective framework can be applied, in order to ensure the plans you develop are centered around goals that are:

• Specific enough that you’ll know what success looks like.
• Measurable, so you don’t have to rely purely on gut or instinct.
• Achievable, meaning the plan’s not too ambitious or unrealistic.
• Relevant to key business objectives (like increasing brand awareness, developing a new product or service, etc.).
• Timely, meaning there are clear and compelling reasons to undertake the plan (and to do so now).

Elate’s unique, dynamic platform was built to empower diverse organizations with the tools and insights they need to create—and implement—more successful strategic plans. Simply put, we understand the importance of strategic planning in an organization and have built a platform that streamlines the strategic planning process. This way, you can create effective plans while driving vital engagement and collaboration from key team members throughout the organization. 

What other platform lets you build, execute, and review plans within a single interface? That’s the Elate difference. Contact us to learn more or get started today.