6 Things To Do Before Choosing A Marketing Tactic

“We should go to that big trade show this year.”

“We need a new website.”

“Shouldn’t we be doing Google Ads.? It looks like everybody else in our industry is doing Google Ads.”

These kinds of questions are difficult because there are so many things you could do with your marketing dollar. And how do you know which is the right one? And how do you know if it works? I think a root cause of the problem here – of the pain – is that people jump too soon to choose which tactic they’re going to do. So I want to share six things that you should do before you make that choice.

First, do you know exactly who it is you’re targeting with this campaign, whatever it is?

Second, do you then know for that particular, uh, profile of person or company, do you know exactly how you want them to experience you throughout their journey to buying and using your product from way back before they ever met you through to being a longtime customer?

Third, do you know if you know that journey? Do you know where things are working pretty well for you in your business, in that experience for your clients or where things are broken,or there’s friction points, or they’re getting stuck?

Fourth, if you know where those gaps in your customer journey are, do you know which are the, say three most important gaps, the ones that are the biggest problem, the biggest pain points? Because so often people try to do everything and nothing moves the needle.

Fifth, do you know, in that one gap that you’ve chosen that’s really important to fix, what it is you want the customer’s behavior to be, to show that it is successful? Because that’s your best way to measure success: to observe behavior change in your client.

Sixth, what metric are you going to use to measure that behavior change in your client with your campaign?

If you’ve done all of this work, choosing your marketing tactic is frankly straightforward – because you know exactly the metric that you want to see, the needle, you want to see move for the people you wanted to move it for, and how much it’s worth to you because of its importance in your journey. That will help you choose the tactic and the budget.