A quick search for “strategy” on my laptop revealed 57 documents. This means that, for the past 10 years, I’ve worked on at least 57 different marketing strategies (plus a few that live on a cloud somewhere).

As a strategist, I took the existence of a documented strategy for granted. I assumed it’s what everyone does when they start a business and then keep reviewing that document for as long as the business lives on.

After a few chats with small business owners and solopreneurs, I realized I was wrong. Very few companies actually have a documented marketing strategy. When it comes to solo businesses, I expect the numbers to be even lower. So let’s fix that, shall we?
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Why bother with a marketing strategy in the first place?

You know what you want and you know which promotional tactics to use to get there. Why bother writing it down?

First off, human memory is unreliable, far more so than you think. Commit to (digital) paper what you don’t want to lose.

Second, companies with a documented marketing strategy are 313% more likely to be successful. Why? I’ve got a one-word answer for you: clarity.

When you write things down, you’re more likely to spot an unrealistic goal, an untrackable metric, or a tactic that was just added for fluff.

Let’s get one other thing out of the way:

Strategy does not equal tactics

I’ve noticed something that most of my clients have in common: they have a list of tactics to grow their business and they’re usually nicely paired with goals. But, despite common belief, this is not a strategy.

A marketing strategy is a holistic view of your road from goal to success, informed by your beliefs and, ideally, data. Marketing tactics are part of it, but NOT the entire thing.

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Example time: let’s say we want to build a new social media platform.

Strategy: based on the belief that social media users are unhappy with the recent evolutions in this space, we’re going to build a better alternative. Our research shows that the best way to get users is to reach influential people on other networks [far easier than targeting each new user individually].

Tactics:

• Approach the top 100 influential voices on two other social media platforms.
• Incentivize them to try our platform
• Get them to become brand ambassadors

See the difference? A strategy informs the tactics. Without it, you’re just throwing everything at a wall hoping something will stick.
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In fact, this is why most tactics don’t work. They are completely cut off from the overarching vision.

Without a strategy, you end up chasing new shiny tactics that may or may not help your goals. You lose focus and a lot of money in the process.

Rand Fishkin has an excellent piece on strategy versus tactics if you want to read more about this.

Now that we got this out of the way, let’s get on with our strategy:

Where do you start building your marketing strategy?

This one’s simple but not easy: always start with your audience. They are the ones that inform all your subsequent decisions. Before you do anything else, get clear on:

• Who are your clients?
• What do they need?
• Where do they hang out (online and/or offline)?
• What’s their throbbing painthat you can solve?
• How do they speak? (answer this to know what tone of voice to use)

When you outline your ICP, your buyer persona, your best-fit client, or whatever else you want to call it, get specific. Use census data, research reports, interviews — anything that helps you understand the size of your audience and what they struggle with.

A word of caution: avoid extreme niching down. It’s hard to scale businesses that cater to tiny audiences so if you’re looking to build more than a side gig, you’re going to need a larger pond to fish in. I’ve written about niching down before if you want to dig deeper into this topic.

Goals are dreams with numbers attached to them

Now that you know whom you’re serving, time to think of yourself: what do you want to achieve?

Again, get specific and add numbers to your goals. You need to be able to track progress.

Bad goal: We need to get more clients this year.

Good goal: We need to onboard 50 new clients by the end of the year.

Excellent goal: We need to onboard 30 new clients in Q3 and 20 in Q4.

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​Bad goal: We need to grow.

Good goal: We have a $800K revenue target this year.

Excellent goal: We need to add an extra $65K of revenue each month.

Why do I insist on the numbers?

Because “more” and “growth” are devoid of meaning and un-actionable. When you add numbers to your goals, you:

• May realize that they are unrealistic (it may be challenging to onboard 30 new clients in a quarter if, historically, you’ve only been able to onboard 10/quarter). The opposite may be true as well: an extra $65K may be aiming too low if you have a solid client acquisition or upselling program.
• You can track your progress: if Q3 is nearly over and you only onboarded 15 clients, you still have time to re-think your strategy for Q4.
• It’s easier to spot which tactics work and which don’t.

Channels and tactics

How do you get those 50 clients by the end of the year? And what’s going to convince them to buy?

This is where all the hard work you put into audience research starts to pay off. By now, you should know where they like to hang out and what type of content they consume.

Time to pick your hero and give it a name. Traditionally, you have five big approaches to choose from:

• Content-led: you attract clients through the content you produce. This is my favorite approach, I’ve built two businesses on it and worked with 300+ others to spark content-led growth. While it works for any kind of business, its biggest drawback is that it takes time to work, irrespective of the channel you choose: social media, SEO, blogging, whitepapers, eBooks, videos, and so on.
• Community-led: your first clients/users become brand ambassadors. This is ideal for creators, newsletters, membership communities, courses, and so on.
• Sales-led: this one is pretty straightforward. You have a sales team that calls, emails, DMs prospects. It can work for pretty much any product or service but you can usually find cheaper alternatives.
• Paid-led: you pay for ads and sponsorships. Again, it can work for nearly any brand in any field. Choosing the right channel for your ads matters the most here.
• Product-led: client acquisition happens through the use of your product. Community-based apps are a good example here. Slack acquired most of its users this way and so did Dropbox. By allowing users to send invites to their peers (better yet, incentivizing them to do so), you can put your growth on auto-pilot and let your clients do the heavy lifting.

Of course, you can always mix and match them, you don’t have to stick to a single one. But you do need to make sure that your leading approach makes sense for your ICP.

Bring it all together

Most marketing strategies follow a Dadaist approach:
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​Image source​

But we’re not creating art here, so we need to be a bit more pragmatic. How do you make sure the tactics you choose will serve your goals?

Research is your best friend (again!). When in doubt, go back to your audience and their pain points.

For instance, your list of tactics could be:

• Publish a blog post every week.
• Post 4 times/week on social media.
• Spend $1000/week on ads.
• Get 1 influencer partnership/month.

This is what the tactics chapter of most strategies reads like. But you’re smarter than that, so you do it better:

• You know 3 of your client’s biggest pain points.
• You know 2 of their objections.
• You know they like to read blogs and watch YouTube videos.
• You know they distrust ads.

⇒ You map out their pain points and objections into as many pieces of content as you need to be truly helpful. You create the content in the formats they prefer (blog and video) and distribute it on the social media platforms they hang out on.

Consequently, your new list of tactics will be:

• Address a new pain point every week in blog format. Soft pitch for your product within each piece.
• Address an objection in video format every week. CTA to your landing page in the video description and mention in the video.
• Repurpose pieces of these two content pillars and publish them alternatively on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Partner with one influencer who has experienced these pain points each month.

See the difference? We’ve eliminated ads altogether and the tactics don’t look arbitrary anymore. They are correlated with your audience’s needs AND with your goals.

This is a very, very simplified approach to tactics and strategy in general. You will, of course, have more tactics, more channels, and a budget to balance. But the principle is the same irrespective of the number of variables.

The marketing mix

By now, you should be able to map out a marketing mix in your strategy. Also known as “the 4 Ps” (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), this is a handy overview of your strategy. HubSpot has a good example:
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You can read more about pricing your products here.

The marketing mix is a very old technique but it has a big advantage: it gives you a bird’s-eye-view over your entire strategy. While the document itself will be much larger, this summarizing exercise remains useful

Your marketing strategy is a living document

It’s not a gospel that’s transmitted from generation to generation. You can alter it — and you should! Your strategy needs to change when the context changes.

For instance, when the economy takes a turn for the worse, you may want to consider recession-proofing your messaging.

More importantly, your tactics aren’t all going to work equally well. So you need to track your KPIs regularly so you know which of them to let go of and what to replace them with.

To do that, choose your KPIs wisely and correlate them with your goals. You’ve probably heard a lot of marketers (myself included) rant against vanity metrics like traffic, views, or social media shares.

While these shouldn’t be the focus of your tracking efforts, they have their place too. The quality of your content won’t matter too much if there’s no one to see it. So you need to start at the top of the funnel to figure out if/where the funnel is cracked:

• How much traffic did your blog post get?
• How many of those readers converted into email subscribers?
• How many of those email subscribers are qualified leads?
• How many of those leads did you close?
• What is the customer LTV (lifetime value) for each of them?
• What is the cost of acquisition? (You’ll need this to figure out your revenue/profit ratio).

As a rule of thumb, you can expect conversion rates between 0,1 and 15%. There are big differences between channels and industries but this is what most marketing tactics yield, with the lower value for the top-of-the-funnel tactics, of course.

Here’s an example:

• Your blog post got 5,000 readers.
• 0,5% of them converted to email subscribers: you have 25 new subscribers
• Half of them are qualified leads: you have 12 qualified leads.
• Your lead conversion rate is 15%: you have 1.8 new clients

This is just a model to show you that you need to start somewhere and that somewhere is usually a vanity metric like traffic.

Before I sign off, one final word of caution:

Think YEARS ahead, not months

I know, we all want growth and we want it NOW! But thinking long-term brings clarity to your short-term actions as well.

If you know where you want to be three years from now, you can break that big, hairy objective into smaller, easier-to-tackle goals that you execute each month. This gives you time to steer the ship back on the right path when you stray (everyone does, expect it and prepare for it).

Most marketing strategies are designed for 1-year timeframes. But the objectives listed at the beginning should be part of a bigger picture. If you want to add $800K to your revenue this year, this shouldn’t be an arbitrary number. It should be part of your strategy to reach $6 million within three years.

That’s it from me today. If you have any questions or need help with your marketing strategy, I’m just an email away. Want to work 1:1 with me? Book a strategy session here!​

See you next Thursday in your inbox!

Here to make you think,

Adriana

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Adriana’s Picks

1. I was on The Nomad Solopreneur Show podcast and I loved it! Gabe Marusca and I talked about reinventing yourself, running multiple businesses, and a ton of other stuff. You can listen to the episode here.
2. ​The AI-generated “Drake” song may rewrite the definition of copyright.
3. If you want to run ads on Twitter, you need to pay for Twitter Blue (or: you know a product is great when you have to force it down users’ throats).
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