The picture on the lid: why strategy beats tactics every time

Imagine someone hands you a thousand jigsaw pieces and no box.

You’d still make some progress, edges first, then group the colours.

But you’d waste hours forcing pieces that don’t fit, and you’d never be sure you weren’t building three different puzzles at once.

That’s how most service businesses do marketing.

The pieces are the tactics: a website, a few posts, a bit of SEO, the newsletter somebody started in January and forgot about by March.

All real pieces.

No picture on the lid.

What “strategy” actually means

Agencies love making strategy sound complicated (it helps justify the invoice).

But strategy is just three questions, answered honestly.

1. Who exactly is your best customer?

Not “anyone who pays”, the ones you’d clone if you could.

2. What journey do they take from stranger to customer?

Where do they first hear about you, what convinces them, and what nearly stops them?

3. What’s the weakest point in that journey right now?

Because that’s where your next pound and your next hour should go - not the newest tactic, the weakest stage.

That’s the picture on the lid.

Every tactic either fits it or it doesn’t get done.

What changes when you have one

You stop starting things.

The half-finished funnel, the abandoned TikTok, the blog with three posts from 2023, they all happen when every new idea looks as good as the last one.

With a strategy, most ideas get a quick, guilt-free “not now”.

Your marketing starts to build on itself.

Random tactics add up slowly, connected ones feed each other.

Say you run a tutoring business.

Your blog post feeds your email list, your emails fill the diary, happy parents leave reviews, and the reviews help you show up on Google when the next parent searches, which brings more people to the blog.

That loop doesn’t happen by accident, somebody has to design it.

You can finally judge what to spend money on.

“Should I do Facebook ads?” is impossible to answer on its own.

Hold it up against your customer journey and it takes ten seconds: does it fix your weakest stage? No? Then not now.

The confession

I’ll be honest, I’ve got skin in this game.

Your Marketing Plan is the first paid thing I recommend to almost everyone, so yea, I would say all this.

But the reason I start there isn’t the money, it’s that I got tired of watching businesses buy the wrong things, from me and from everyone else.

A website built without a strategy is a guess with nice fonts.

Ads without a journey behind them are just hope with a budget.

I’d rather sell you the right thing second than the wrong thing first.

And if you’d rather do it yourself, that’s fine too.

Your job today

Score your business against the six stages of The Perfect Customer Journey. Find your weakest one. Fix that first.

That half hour of thinking beats another month of busy tactics, and it’s the same thinking I’d do with you on a Plan.

The pieces you’ve already got are probably fine.

You just need the lid.

Not sure where you’re weakest?

That’s what Your Web Review is for. I look at your website, Google profile, reviews and socials, record a video going through it all, and give you the three things I’d fix first.

No big sales pitch.

Get your free Web Review

And if you’d like one short email every Sunday on making your marketing easier, get the Marketing Memo. It’s free.