Is Your Marketing Strategy Guided, or Is It Just Guesswork?

As any small business owner would agree, growth is the name of the game. All too often, however, these fledgling businesses wind up in the “Great Tactics Race.” In my years working for and advising entrepreneurs and marketers, time and time again I’ve heard them talk about “amazing” ways to market their company, such as paid search ads, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and more. Tactics are often seen as shiny new objects that create buzz and promise impressive results.

Yet when well-intentioned folks eagerly embrace these tactics, they tend to jump straight in with both feet. Many of them sink major funds into building a fancy website, hiring a social media consultant and creating lots of Google ads. While these tactics definitely have the potential to bring in business and raise brand awareness, it’s crucial to address some essential questions first:

• Is this really the best choice of tactics to meet my business’s goals?
• Are your prospective customers really on this “legacy” social media site that’s got millions of users and has been around for years, or that other one that just launched but is getting a lot of buzz?
• Or is social media marketing even the right tactic for you at all?

It’s like setting off on a long ocean voyage without a destination or guidance tools. How will you know when you’ve arrived, or if you ever will?

Related: Data-Driven Strategies for Achieving Excellence in Marketing

The real mistake: asking “how” before “what”

Embracing tactics before finalizing a strategy is the real mistake. It’s understandable, of course. Business owners and leaders are naturally excited to get going and start making money, and they believe — not entirely without reason — that the latest tactics will get them there. Marketing consultants often get asked basic entry questions, like “How do we start with Google Ads?” or “How can we grow our TikTok account?”

These aren’t bad questions, per se. They’re just not the questions you want to start with.

The first question should be, “What strategy should we adopt to reach our stated goals?” Another way to elicit the same information is to figure out what the business needs to achieve and what conditions or actions would help you reach those goals and support your growth. If a business’s goal is to increase sales by 25%, for example, then those actions need to include obtaining a deeper understanding of the target market — where they live and shop, what their economic and educational backgrounds are like, where they spend time online, what sources of information influence them and so on.

Then, with that information in hand, the business can make intelligent choices about which tactics best support their goal. Starting with the “what” helps clarify the goal and the context. If you focus on the “how” first, you could wind up pouring limited funds and resources into channels that aren’t likely to help you get to your goal.

Related: Don’t Waste Your Money (or Time) on These 3 Marketing Tactics

A real-world example

To illustrate this more clearly, let’s start with a hypothetical company eager for growth. Let’s say it decides to invest heavily in Google Ads, spending $5,000 a month right off the bat, in hopes that the ads will quickly drive a steady stream of ready-to-purchase customers right to the door.

There’s just one problem: No one at the company knows for sure whether their target audience actually uses Google to search for the product that the company sells.

So if this company’s product is fairly niche, it may well not prompt enough search volume to warrant such a high budget. The company will be wasting money and also losing out on the opportunity to engage in a more appropriate and likely successful tactic. With a little advance research, the company could have learned that their target audience supported about $2,000 ad budget — meaning they’ve essentially wasted $3,000 each month, since those ads are only reaching people who won’t convert.

The problem isn’t so much the tactic. It’s the lack of an underlying strategy. The company failed to outline the bigger picture by researching where its customers look for information on its products. That would have established whether a Google ad campaign was the right platform to meet its goals.

Related: Most Businesses Miss This Critical Revenue Driver. Here’s How to Avoid That Mistake.

The better approach

The more productive approach to marketing your small business is to begin by exploring strategies, informed by your goals. Starting with strategy helps you create a winning roadmap for all future marketing choices.

The key is to have specific, measurable goals. If the goal is to increase sales by 15% in the next quarter, for instance, you should start by researching the most effective ways to reach that target audience and convert them into paying customers. Identify the types of content that help motivate and persuade those target prospects and which platforms that they engage with most frequently.

Once you’ve pinpointed the right channels, you can then build effective tactical plans around those channels. Taken in this order, the tactics serve your strategy, instead of a scattershot approach that may or may not hit the target.

Related: Here’s How I Determine If I’m Getting Value Out of X (and How You Can, Too)

How to fix this all-common mistake with a strong marketing strategy

Let’s break it down step by step, to help you avoid the pitfalls of tactic-first thinking. Here’s how you can ensure your business is building the right foundation through its marketing efforts:

Step 1: Define clear growth targets

Set specific growth goals that make sense for your business model and company values. Make sure the goals are specific and measurable — for example, increase revenue by 25% over the next two quarters.

Step 2: Identify channels where growth is possible

After you’ve set your business’s goals, turn your attention to researching the channels that align best with those goals. If your goal is to expand your customer base and those target prospects skew young, you’ll have more success on TikTok than on Facebook or with paid search ads.

Step 3: Test strategic assumptions before execution

Don’t rush into creating TikTok videos just yet. Instead, first test your assumptions by exploring different potential channels on a smaller, lower-stakes scale. Perhaps you want to try adding a video into your social media rotation to measure engagement or conducting a short survey to confirm that your target audience is where you think they are.

Step 4: Finally, optimize tactics and measure results

Now you’re ready to commit your resources into tactics and optimize their use in your marketing plan. You might choose to tweak your ad copy, run more split tests, expand your social media posts or spruce up a stale website design to improve conversions. And of course, you’ll continue to measure and document your results to make sure you keep moving towards your goals.