What’s funny about the field of marketing and the expertise that’s out there is that it’s really split between two main camps:

• • Those who spend more time considering a company’s big-picture, strategic approach
  • Those who focus on the more tactical, ongoing operational approach.

At Marketing Nice Guys, because we work with a lot of smaller businesses who need day-to-day help to “keep the trains running,” we spend a lot of time in the latter. What that means is that we try to help companies optimize their funnels, especially when it comes to the little things that will improve a company’s ROI. In this role, we focus on developing tactical approaches that will hopefully maximize the number of prospects who get from one buyer journey stage to the next. That, after all, really defines marketing tactics – getting customers one step closer to purchase. In this “tactical” mode, any marketing agency will need a lot of specific expertise in very specific channels – whether that’s website development, SEO, content development, paid media, email & marketing automation, mobile, social media, etc.

But in order to do marketing well at any level, as a company, your strategy or big picture has to be on point as well. In other words, you need both. We often say that businesses that don’t work through the bigger picture will certainly struggle against competitors even if they do all the right tactical things. To give you an example, we run across companies all the time that do a great job setting up all the right email marketing automation or creating content on a regular basis. But all the automation in the world and the volume of content created won’t generate more customers if that big-picture, high-level strategic approach is off.

That’s why, as a full-service marketing agency, we think it’s important to provide both for our clients. How do you think big picture? There are no “silver bullets” out there, but here are the four areas that we always recommend that all companies should focus on when developing that larger strategy.

Area No. 1 for Big-Picture Thinking: Know Your Audience and Empathize with Them

There’s an old saying that marketing starts and ends with our audience. As a small business, we can’t emphasize enough that knowing your audience and empathizing with them might be one of the biggest keys to success. This means understanding their challenges and pain points, as well as the core emotions that drive them.

To truly empathize with your audience, you need to put yourself in their shoes. What keeps them up at night? What are they looking for in a product or service? What do they need in order to make a decision? Once you have a clear understanding of your audience, you can tailor your messaging and/or adjust your tactics to resonate with them.

To give you a recent example, Boney and I recently co-invested in a women’s beauty products site that we run (not as part of Marketing Nice Guys) with two others. To be honest, we invested in it for fun but neither Boney nor I know anything about what it’s like to put on makeup, lipstick, or use a bronzer because we’ve never needed to.

For that reason, we’ve hired one of my former students at Georgetown who I know happens to be more of an expert in the space. We asked her to take a look at the site as we’ve been getting a lot of people to view products, but so far not a lot of purchases. She said one thing that really struck us about our product pages. “Women don’t buy lipsticks or bronzers unless they know the color works with their skin tone.” She said, having “swatches” – literally a term derived from the fabrics industry in which designers could show the type of fabric used – would help, as customers could literally see what the color would look like with their skin tone.

In other words, empathy isn’t just knowing or having products aimed at women. It runs deeper than that. It’s knowing what the hang-ups are, what stops them from buying, and understanding how some colors may not work at all for those with different skin tones.  

Now that we understand that from a big-picture standpoint, we have to go implement that on the website from a tactical standpoint. In other words, the big picture here informs the tactical approach.

Area No. 2 for Big-Picture Thinking: Understanding How to Reach Your Audience with the Right Message at the Right Time

Knowing your audience is important, but you also need to understand how to reach them. This includes knowing where to target them and how to put the right message in front of them at the right time. Good marketing, after all, is the combination of many factors – what you say to them, at what point you say it, and how you say it – all of which will certainly affect the behavioral outcome you seek.

A simple example is this. Let’s say you sell books. And as part of the outreach to customers who’ve bought a book, you want to solicit a review from them because the social proof/testimonial will help you convince others to buy it. Let’s say they buy it. You probably wouldn’t send that request for a review the next day. After all, they haven’t finished reading the book. But you might send it after a few weeks when at least they’ve had time to get into the story. And, of course, this same principle applies to any advertising or promotion.

Indeed, it’s important to consider the customer journey when creating your marketing strategy. Where are your customers in the buying process? Are they just starting to research solutions to their problem, or are they ready to make a purchase? We often see companies try to sell a product in their ads before they’ve established any authority. Not only will that be a waste of money, but it will also cause an endless source of frustration for that business. Better to understand the messaging you need for the journey stage your prospects are in.

Area No. 3 for Big-Picture Thinking: Build a Strong Brand with a Specific Narrative

We talk about this often because it may be the most important aspect of any marketing. Building a strong brand with a clear narrative is essential for any small business. It not only helps you reach more people but also enables better SEO and creates downstream benefits of trust and authority. In our post linked above, we cover six areas to create a strong brand from a tactical perspective:

• • Put yourself out there constantly
  • Focus on a narrower area at first
  • Create content and more content
  • Take care of customers and get good word-of-mouth
  • Pay attention to details
  • Have patience and think long-term

But in order for those tactical steps to be effective, companies need to establish a narrative that resonates with an audience. In the marketing sense, think of a good narrative as that cross-point at which a company projects itself AND where that meets the specific audiences’ needs and challenges. For example, BMW projects itself as “the ultimate driving machine” and similarly, its upper-class customers see that narrative as matching their own ambitions to look good and drive a more “statement” or high-performance luxury vehicle. That’s a good match. But in many cases, company narratives can become disjointed or change depending on the different audiences they want to target. We see it happen all the time, especially in retail. For example, companies that have established older audiences that they seem to serve on the website, but then in social media, try to target a younger, Gen Z or young millennial crowd.  

A good narrative takes into account a few things:

• • Who you are (your values, beliefs, cultural background strengths)
  • Who your audience is (their challenges, psychographics, etc.)
  • Who your competition is (and what space they play in)

It takes those inputs and brings it all together in terms of how you as a company want to show up every day, consistently. And because it considers your competition and your audience, you hopefully come out with a unique cross-point where you can meet your customers with your brand projection.

For more on this, we always pay homage to our friend Toby Trevarthen, who has developed the Narrative Playbook, dedicated to improving personal and corporate narratives.

Area No. 4 for Big-Picture Thinking: Willingness to Take Risks and Try Something New

Finally, great small businesses need to be willing to take risks and try something new. This means testing new marketing tactics, analyzing performance, and optimizing based on what results they see.

Many small businesses are hesitant to try new things because they fear failure. However, this is a mistake. Failure is a natural part of the learning process, and you can often learn more from your failures than your successes.

For example, let’s say you decide to run a Facebook ad campaign for the first time. After a few weeks, you see that the campaign is not performing as well as you had hoped. Instead of giving up on Facebook ads altogether, you can use the data you’ve collected to optimize your campaign. Perhaps you need to tweak your targeting, adjust your messaging, or try a different ad format. By making these changes and testing again, you can improve your results and ultimately drive more conversions. Or you can decide to try another platform.

But we’ve seen companies try advertising for a short period of time – literally for one month in some cases – and then they decide it’s just not working. They had expected big returns immediately, which was certainly unrealistic. But because they didn’t have a mindset of one willing to take risks or keep trying different things to learn what works, we fear their businesses may only ever reach a certain point.

In other words, from a big-picture perspective, if you’re going to be good at marketing, you have to strategically consider it more of an ongoing risk and a learning experience. It’s only through failing in some cases, that you learn where you can improve. That’s a hard lesson for a lot of companies but one they should all take to heart if they eventually want to scale and grow.