Best marketing strategy for a new business

The first step is clearly understanding the difference between a strategy and a tactic. There often seems to be a good deal of confusion between the two.

In sports, coaches develop a strategy, most commonly referred to as a “game plan”, for their team. The purpose of the game plan is to focus on the strengths of their team and take advantage of the weaknesses of the competition. For example, let’s pretend we’re coaching a football team that is great at running the ball but below average at passing it. Our next game is against a team that has a history of poor defense against the run. A winning strategy would more than likely be to run the ball at least 60-70% of the time. The strategy doesn’t get into all the details of how we’re going to run the ball, it just states that in order to win the game, our team is going to focus on the run.

Tactics tell us how we’re going to execute the strategy. So, in our example, some tactics might be:

• Never snap the ball with more than :03s on the play clock.

• Run consistently to the right side of the field because our offensive line is stronger there.

• Rotate our top 2 running backs equally to keep them fresh.

You get the idea. The strategy tells us what to focus on in order to win and the tactics tell us exactly how we’re going to do it.

Successful small business marketing strategies

Back to marketing. A lot of businesses want to jump right to tactics. “We need a solution for SEO!” “Why aren’t we doing social media marketing? Everyone is talking about it.” SEO and social media are both tactics that generally make sense for every business but we need to create a winning strategy or “game plan” on how to best get these tactics to work for your business.