Stop Starting With Tactics: A 10-Minute Introduction to Marketing Strategy
If your marketing starts with “I feel like we should be doing more…”, there’s a good chance you’re starting in the wrong place.
More social media. More content. More emails. Maybe some paid ads. Perhaps you should be doing something with AI.
There’s never a shortage of things you could be doing, the problem is that it is often unclear what you should be doing.
In this short presentation, I explain why effective marketing starts before the tactics, with what the business is actually trying to achieve, and where your time, money and attention are best spent.
Start with what you're trying to achieve
Before deciding whether you need more content, social media, ads or anything else, you need to understand what the business is actually trying to achieve. Then you can work out what marketing needs to do to support that.
That might sound obvious, but without that direction it’s very easy for marketing to become reactive.
Someone suggests you should be on a particular platform, so you add it to the list. A competitor starts doing something, so perhaps you should too. A new tool comes along and suddenly that feels like another thing you need to think about.
Before long, you’re doing quite a lot of marketing without being particularly clear on why you’re doing it.
Strategy should make decisions easier
The most useful things a marketing strategy can do is help you decide where to focus.
Most businesses don’t have unlimited time, money or people. So trying to do everything usually just means spreading those resources more thinly.
Getting clear on where the business is going helps you define what marketing should contribute, and what deserves prioritisation.
"Marketing shouldn’t be driven by the next idea. It should be driven by the next priority."
If your marketing feels reactive, you’ve got a growing list of things you think you should be doing, or you’re simply not sure where to focus, that’s exactly the sort of thing I help businesses with.
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