Strategy Before Tactics

You have an amazing service or product you know will blow people away. All you need is to let people know just how awesome! But how do you do that? Marketing!

Marketing helps you tell the outside world know how you can make their lives better. But how do you know the best way to do that? That ?is the $200 BILLION question!

Some marketers will have you build a website optimized for search engines (SEO). Others will say social media is the path to take. You might hear about email marketing, and some will still hold true to traditional methods like radio and television. These are all tactics that work to varying degrees. However, they are often missing one key first step, the element that makes all the difference–a marketing strategy unique to, and carefully crafted specifically for, their business.

Why Develop a Marketing Strategy First?

Why develop a marketing strategy before anything else? Developing a marketing strategy first:

• Allows you to use your resources more efficiently
• Ensures your marketing is in line with your overall business strategy
• Helps you identify the customers you should target
• Helps you identify which products and/or services you should focus on
• Makes your marketing more efficient
• Keeps costs down

For a set of tactics to be effective, you must have an underlying strategy that ties everything together. Your strategy acts as a north star for your marketing efforts by reminding you what your resources are, who you should be targeting, which services/products are most profitable, and whether your marketing plan fits into the rest of the business.

Lack of a proper strategy may result in missing out on a key factor, which can render much of your marketing efforts moot.

Questions to Ask

Here are some questions to ask prior to deciding how you should market your business:

• What are the services/products that generate the most revenue?
• Who are your most profitable customers?
• Which resources do I have to devote to marketing? (Do not forget to include time as a resource.)
• How does this fit into my overall business strategy?

Asking and answering these questions is the first step to creating a personalized and profitable marketing strategy for you and your business, and one that will then help you decide which tactics are best to market your business.