Understanding the basics of marketing strategy

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If there’s one aspect of marketing most misunderstood, it’s the entire idea of strategy. The best way to explain marketing strategy is through analogy, so let’s look at how to construct marketing strategy as a road trip.

The first part of a road trip is deciding where you want to go. Most people wouldn’t settle for a road trip in which you just drive around randomly and hope something interesting happens. That’s fun only briefly. Most people have destinations and waypoints, points of interest like seeing the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.

In marketing strategy, this is your end business objective. What destination is your marketing strategy supposed to help you reach? More revenue? Higher numbers of sales? Greater numbers of volunteers? More leads?

Like all road trips, when you reach your destination, you know you’re there. You know you’ve arrived. The same is true for marketing strategy. There must be some objective, easily quantified metric that indicates that you’ve gotten where you want to go. If there isn’t, then you don’t have a viable strategy.

The second part of a road trip is deciding how you want to get there. You get out your mapping app, Google Maps, and local reviews app and you plot out all the places you want to go, then decide on your route. How far will you drive in a day? Which route has the most rest stops? Which route connects to all the desired waypoints?

In marketing, these are your tactics, your day to day choices that govern what you’re going to do, what tools you’re going to use, the cadence of their use, etc. Do you send a weekly newsletter or a monthly newsletter? Do you tweet 5 times a day? Do you have a content calendar? Where does your content come from? Who blogs for you?

Tactics need to be measured too, at least at the level of whether or not they were successfully executed. Did you ship your newsletter on time? Did your graphic designer get you all your creatives? Did you publish to Facebook enough? Did you blog on schedule?

The final part of the road trip is methods, the individual choices you make along the way. Do you drive 55 MPH and get there a little slower, but without any speeding tickets? Do you park in the sun or the shade? Methods are tiny individual choices that may or may not influence the outcome of the road trip but can certainly change how it feels when you’re driving down the road. For example, you can get greater fuel efficiency by not using the air conditioner, but if your road trip is through Texas in July, you’ll sacrifice a great deal of comfort for a few dollars on gas.

In marketing, methods are the choices you make in your use of the tools. Do you post with an image all of the time on Facebook? Do you mirror your Facebook posts to Google+? Do you send an email that’s longer or shorter?

Do methods need to be measured? Yes, to judge the individual small choices and improve upon them, much in the same way that you’d want to measure your fuel efficiency and improve upon it when driving. Each individual small method may not have a great impact on the final outcome (inflating tires to maximum safe pressure, for example, will give you about 1-4% more fuel efficiency), but in aggregate they can add up significantly.

The danger that most marketers run into is confusing strategy, tactics, and methods. Tweeting at 9 AM isn’t a strategy, much in the same way that driving 55 MPH isn’t a strategy. None of these methods have anything to do with reaching a destination.

More important, if you’re not getting results out of your marketing efforts, consider whether you’ve got a viable strategy (destination) first before questioning your tactics and methods. It doesn’t matter how fast you make the car go if you’re driving in the wrong direction, and it doesn’t matter how much you optimize your SEO or how cheap your ad CTRs are if you’re not hitting your goals.

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