Do you ever get the feeling that you’re busy doing marketing “things” in your business – busy posting stuff on Facebook, busy updating your website, busy doing “stuff”, but nothing seems to be really working?
Often that’s because you’re focused on tactical things but you haven’t developed a clear strategy before implementing those tactics.
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Jason Foss.
What we’re talking about today is objectives, turning into strategy, turning into tactics.
What do I mean?
Well if you had to get to a new address, a place you have not been before, you might look up the address on Google Maps.
Google Maps will then give you some options: you can this way, or go that way (and it’s a couple of minutes slower), but it’ll give you some options on how you can get from where you are now to where you need to be. So you pick one of those options and you hop into the car and you start driving. And you will be turning the steering wheel and be putting your foot on the brake and accelerator and changing years, and doing what you need to do to follow that route to get to where you need to go.
So if you think about that, the address that you need to get to is like your objective. That’s where you need to be. The options that Google Maps gives you are different strategic options. You’ve got some different ways of get to we need to be, and you can choose one of those strategies. Then when you hop into your car and start driving, tactics are the things that you’re actually doing to get there. So the turning of the steering wheel, operating the pedals, changing of the gears – they are all tactical things.
If you jump in can’t start driving, and you didn’t have an objective or a strategy in place, you’d be busy driving the car – and you will be moving – it will feel like you doing stuff, but are you getting anywhere? You could be driving in circles. You could be driving off in the complete opposite direction to where you need to be!
However, if you’ve got an objective in place – somewhere you need to be – and then you looked at your options as to how to get there (you’ve chosen a route through Google Maps for example) when you then implement your tactics (the turning of the steering wheel, turning left here then turning right there) in line with your strategy, you’re going to get to where you need to be.
We see a lot of small businesses not doing any strategic work – not having any objective – busy doing stuff but just driving in circles for the most part.
That’s why it’s really important – before you start doing anything, spending any money on any tactical things – make sure that you know where it is that you need to get to. What it is you’re trying to do. And then put some consideration into how you are going to get there. What methods do we need to think about? Who your ideal customers are. What sort of things they might be looking for. How they might be thinking. Look at your alternatives. It could be competition or indirect competition, so “alternative” is a better word for mine. What are your customer’s alternatives to choosing you? Why would they choose you? And once you’ve given some thought to these sort of things you can develop a strategy around getting to where you need to be.
Then the things that you need to actually do will either make sense or not make sense, and you can make some smart decisions about what you choose to spend your time and money and doing.
An example
Raising revenue or increasing your sales is an objective, and there are three main strategies that you could probably follow to help you obtain that objective.
- You can either get more customers,
- you can increase the average sale value, or
- you can increase the frequency with which you existing customers come back and buy from you.
There are three main strategies that you can follow to help you achieve the objective of generating more revenue.
Now once you choose one of those strategies, the tactics that you then implement will differ depending on which of those three strategies you’ve chosen. Have a think about it – “what are we doing here” – when we spending our marking budget – is that going to help us achieve any of those strategies – and how.
Food for thought – I might cover some of these other things in a bit more detail in a future video.