Strategy Is the Thing Nobody Does
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Anti-Viral. And in this episode, I want to concentrate on talking about strategy. I’m going to do an entire episode on strategy today. And I think it’s one of the most underutilized tools that business owners don’t use. Usually, most people focus on tactics. They focus on the platforms. Google ads, what is it that I should be doing, the actionable things. And not as many people think of strategy as the right thing to focus on at any point in time in their marketing.
I think it’s a very powerful tool that can actually help you make better decisions, because that’s essentially what it is. And I think a lot of people think of strategy as this very enigmatic thing, this very woo woo thing, that it’s hard to understand exactly what it is because it’s not a tactic. So hopefully in this episode, I can help you understand what it is and how I think about strategy and the things that I do around it that can potentially help you understand your marketing in a much better way.
Strategy Is Context
The way that I like to explain strategy is as context. Strategy to me is context. And if you think about this, think of your favourite TV show or think of whatever movie you’ve seen that has a cold open, meaning it just starts in the middle. Whether it’s a sword fight or, I think of Batman, The Dark Knight, it starts with a bank heist. It just kind of starts you off and you’re trying to puzzle things together and you’re essentially lost.
But as the movie goes along, they start giving you these pieces of information. The reason why they are fighting, the reason why this is happening. And then you’re like, I get it. And so the next thing that you see starts making sense. Sometimes you can sort of start realizing where the storyline will end up because you have enough context to understand what the most logical decision is next.
And that’s essentially how strategy should work. It gives you enough knowledge to know what is the next step to take. That’s why I call it context.
Strategy vs. Planning
And to the point of the opening for this episode, I think a lot of people, when they start planning for their marketing, confuse planning with strategy. But strategy is the thing that sits on top of planning. Plans are the tactical portion of strategy because you should already know what steps you need to take by the time that you go into planning. Planning is essentially scheduling. Who does what, what happens where. That is not the same thing as strategy. Strategy is the thing that comes before it.
So when people go to sit down with their marketing, trying to figure out what it is, they usually have no idea where to go. There are so many options, so many things that you could do. As I mentioned in the last episode, it gets very overwhelming. So many avenues and so many tools that you just start doing them all. And you get bogged down by the simple amount of things you could do and so much to optimize in each and every one of them.
And more often than not, time becomes the single largest bottleneck on any business. You only have so much time in a day, and you spend most of that time working on your business, trying to make sales, trying to put out fires. And then you sit down to do your marketing and you realize that there is so much more that you have to do and you don’t have the time. So you don’t do it. Or you go the other way and you try to make everything your marketing. You do every single thing everybody has ever told you you should do or everything that you’ve seen on YouTube.
Busy Is Not a Strategy
And there is a book from Cal Newport called Slow Productivity. In that book, he talks about how in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable, many people turn towards the industrial indicator of productivity. Because you have no idea what you should be doing, so you just go back to the baseline. The industrial indicator is doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
So the fact that you are doing a lot of things naturally makes you feel better because it’s like, at least I’m doing something. At least I am moving something forward. I don’t know if it’s moving forward. And even if it is, I don’t know where it’s going. But at least I am working on something and that something feels like progress. But that’s not how it works. That’s not good enough. You could be moving sideways and you wouldn’t know.
So most people end up piling a lot of stuff and never ask the question that is actually meant to be answered by strategy, which is, is this worth doing? Or what is worth doing? You want to be able to answer this question, but that’s a very hard question to answer. So it’s easier to just do something and then hope for the best.
And what ends up happening is essentially the internet noise we have nowadays. This is what caused it. Everybody is loud and is active and they all have no idea what they’re aiming at with their activity. Nobody knows where their marketing growth is going towards, all the effort that they’re putting in, where is it going? And you get a lot of these half-baked campaigns or half-baked posts and mixed information.
If you don’t know where you are going, every road feels possible.
And there’s this idea that doing the wrong thing efficiently is worse than doing the right thing badly. I think that is very true. It’s easy to just try and optimize and try to be as efficient as possible on the things that you are doing. But if those things aren’t working, doing them better doesn’t make any difference.
The 126-Year-Old Funnel
When it comes to strategy, I feel like a lot of people immediately start thinking about the big gigantic thing that is called a funnel in marketing. As soon as I talk about strategy, I think a lot of people start thinking, okay, this person is going to help me create a funnel for my business. And that is not quite what it is. And that is not quite how things work anymore, even though everybody still talks about the funnel.
This concept of a funnel was actually created by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. That is over 100 years ago. That concept worked really well for that time period. If you think about it, at that time there was basically a newspaper, maybe a radio station. The sales cycle and the marketing of it was actually fairly simple, fairly linear because there weren’t as many choices as there are today in terms of technology.
There was only one thing you did. You advertised and then you became a little bit better than your competition. All you had to do was be better than the person next door, because you’re in a town and that town is essentially isolated. If you were the one bringing in the product that people needed, you were one of maybe two. So this funnel idea of coming in at the top, they don’t know anything, you tell them what you sell, and then they come out and become a customer. That’s how it worked.
Problem is that’s not how the world works anymore. With technology, the world has opened up. Now our competition is essentially the entire world. Every single possible solution to whatever problem you’re trying to solve is your competition. And not only is it competition, but everything is asking for that audience’s attention.
I like to explain this as a river flowing downstream. That river is attention. Back in the day of the funnel, that river was fairly calm. It moved from point A to point B, and you could scoop up with your funnel and grab attention and get clients out of it. But with the evolution of technology, that river started flowing faster and faster. More competition kept coming up to that attention river to grab more and more people.
And the internet, which is the culmination of everything, put an end to that river and created a cliff. The river became a waterfall. The attention and everything, the entire world is open for you to see. There is so much going on and it’s flowing so fast. And you’re now competing at the bottom of that waterfall against millions and millions of businesses, and everybody is fighting to be close enough to get some level of attention.
I did the math. We’re using a 126-year-old model designed for a completely different world. People have tried to change the concept of the funnel and adapt it. Now there’s five different levels inside a funnel, or people like HubSpot have created a circular funnel. But I think what we need is not a better funnel. What we need is a completely different model altogether.
World Building
Going back to how people interact in the first place, conversations aren’t linear. When you talk to someone in person, people meander in every single conversation. You never have the same conversation twice. Even if you have your pitch rehearsed and ready, you always kind of turn and things happen. You get down a rabbit hole and then move yourself back into position. People ask about where your kids go to school, or you just went rafting this past weekend. That’s just how people interact. It’s a non-linear way. And by the end, if people like you enough, they end up buying from you anyway.
This nonlinear pattern is the strategy that I like to create. And I call this model world building.
Essentially, you’re building a world for people. And that world can have many different entry points. People can enter through Facebook, people can enter through your website, people can enter through a radio ad that you’ve created. Different pages, your blogs, they just kind of go and look around. If you look at your website analytics, people are clicking wherever they please. They never click in a linear fashion. Even though your menu has home, then about, then services, then contact, people never flow through the way that you want them to. They get to pick. They have the agency.
If you need a little bit more explanation, think about it like the choose your own adventure books. Those books were really interesting. You started on page one and then you had a choice and that choice led to another chapter further down the book that had more choices. You got to choose your own story based on the decisions that you made. And what was great about those books was that you, as the reader, had the agency. The book didn’t pick for you.
That is essentially how world building works. You are creating a bunch of different things through your different areas. Once people get into your website, they can go to your blog, they can go to your about page, your email, anywhere they like. And no matter where they go to find information, eventually everything funnels down to choices. Do you want to go here or do you want to go over there? And those choices, all of them, no matter where they go, eventually converge to one single path, which is the sign up for more information, or book a call, or something that leads to that sale.
The reason I call it world building is because a lot of marketing nowadays is operated under a silo. Your ads are doing one thing, your website says another thing, your social media posts say another thing, and none of them are working together. When you think of the strategy of world building, you’re putting all of these channels, all of these platforms, your website, your posts, everything together in a way that feels like there’s a logical next step for people to take. You’re building an ecosystem that crosses through many platforms, many posts, many pages, many ways of thinking.
All of it is centred around that journey of going from not knowing, to knowing, to liking, to trusting, to becoming a customer. That journey can happen anywhere they like, whether they watch a video from you or read a blog. All these different pieces need to converge, and your work as the marketer is to have people navigate all the different pieces of that journey so that they feel like they are convincing themselves to take the next logical step. They’ve read through everything, this person seems right, so the next logical thing is to give them a call.
Your Audience Is a Community
Your audience is the one with the agency. So many people have talked about how in the old days of marketing, the business was the one that had the power. You advertise on TV, you advertise on the radio, and people would just flock to you. The business had the power. I tell you this is the right thing and nobody would question it. It was simpler times. And now as technology has opened our eyes to so much, the agency has reversed. Now the audience is the one in control. They get to choose what they do with their attention. You’re asking for it, but they don’t have to give it to you unless they want to.
That concept is what I bring into the strategy because this world building, this choose your own adventure sort of scenario, allows people to have that agency. They’re the ones choosing every single step of the way to get closer and closer to knowing you, to liking you, to trusting you. And when they get to the end of that world, they become citizens of your world. Clients. Because that’s the next logical step.
To me this is natural. This is just flowing with what people are meant to be doing and what people do naturally. But a lot of people don’t think about it from the audience perspective. A lot of people think of their business from a first person perspective. As the business owner, I need people to do this. I need my marketing to do this. And not from the other side. What is it that the audience wants? What is it that they would care about learning or knowing more to bring them along that journey?
And because they never think about that, they also never think about their audience as a community. I think the main reason for people’s existence is to form community in some form. I have things that I like. I have hobbies. I like going to theatre. I like watching movies. I like watching anime. And I tend to befriend people that have similar hobbies or that like the same things that I do. If you like anime and I like anime, we can be friends because we have something in common, something we can talk about. And then we join other groups of people and friendship happens.
It’s the same with any business. Business to me is essentially a community building effort because everybody in the audience that you’re trying to attract has the same problem and is looking for a specific type of solution that works for them. People have an issue that they want dealt with. People are feeling something that they want to change. And you’re one of the possibilities for helping them through that. They get to choose if you are right for them.
When you are right for them, you’re essentially doing the same thing as building community because these people have something in common. If you put your clients in a room together, chances are a lot of them would get along. And that something in common is not only the problem that you’ve solved, but it’s you as well. You have a certain set of values, a certain style of doing things, a certain way of explaining things. And the way that you do things is what people get attracted to. There might be ten other people trying to sell them something, but they like you. And chances are a lot of these people that have become your clients have a very similar value set as you, because it resonates.
So they are connected. And your job as the marketer is to think about this community, how to build it, make it more robust and stronger, because they’re the ones that are going to give you the referrals. They’re the ones that are going to keep coming back.
The big problem nowadays with marketing is that people tend to follow the templates, follow what the influencer tells them, what AI can help you do. But they’re not creating anything that people want to interact with. They’re creating the funnel that tries to catch people but not invite them in. Not building community with them. You’re essentially just trying to create a way for them to zip by as quickly as possible with their wallets open so you can grab as they go along and then move to the next one. You’re building an assembly line instead of building a community. And when you think of building a community, things really start to change.
The 85% Aren’t Ready Yet
A lot of people aren’t ready to buy right now, even if they are the perfect audience for you. Think about the way that you buy things as well. There are different stages at which you buy. When you are just searching for something, you’re searching for a solution because you have a problem, but it’s not a big enough problem. You’re just trying to figure out what’s happening. You’re in research mode.
There’s a statistic that 15% of an audience, of the market, whatever industry you’re in, are at any point in time ready to buy right now. When you are creating the funnel, the assembly line, you are targeting essentially 15% of the market. The rest, the 85% of the people, are in different stages. They will eventually buy, usually within the next two years or so. But you are leaving a lot of people behind by just trying to get money as quickly as possible instead of building community.
Most people don’t have a big enough problem that they have to deal with it right now. It’s something they have to deal with eventually but not right now. They’re not ready. But when they’re ready, you want them to choose you. And that is the relationship building effort that takes time and takes energy and takes trust so that when they are ready, you’re the first person they call.
What Marketing Strategy Actually Is
So creating busy work for your marketing just for the sake of doing marketing is not the right way. Creating a world so that your marketing has a reason to exist, a reason to attract a certain group of people regardless of where they sit in their decision, that is the right context. And that is marketing strategy.
A lot of people confuse business strategy with marketing strategy. Business strategy with a SWOT analysis and gap analysis and all these kinds of things, that is fine. That is for a different level of understanding for your business specifically. When you think about marketing strategy, think about how do I get people ready and build that relationship? How do I build that community so that they become my clients?
Marketing strategy is exclusively around how do I do the next right thing and use the channels and use everything together to build better clients, to build more clients, to grow by building that foundation that allows me to create clients for a long time.
That is the right context.