Step 1 of Marketing Success

We just wrapped up the 7 critical elements to successfully marketing your products or services, and I hope you’ve taken the time to read about each of these 7 marketing elements.

If you haven’t already read them, you’ll find them here:

1. Marketing Should Be Your #1 Responsibility
2. Branding Is NOT Marketing
3. Direct Response Marketing Is King
4. Join The Conversation
5. Educate Your Prospects and Customers
6. Develop Real Relationships
7. Marketing Consistency is CRITICAL

Okay, now that you’ve caught yourself up with what we’re talking about, there’s another critical distinction we need to make in order to truly understand marketing and see how it can help you grow your business.  And that distinction is the difference between marketing strategies and marketing tactics.

Marketing strategies are the over-arching plan of attack. It’s the why you do what you do when it comes to marketing your products or services.  It’s the roadmap that gets you from Point A to Point Z.

Tactics on the other hand are simply tools, methods, or mediums you use to carry out your marketing strategy. They’re the actual vehicles that get you from Point A to Point Z.

(definitions courtesy of Dictionary.com)

Unfortunately, when most people think of marketing they think of tactics, and not the strategy. As a result, they end up investing money on marketing methods or tactics that aren’t well suited for their particular business, they end up frustrated because they things they’re doing don’t seem to be working, and they end up with this false belief that marketing doesn’t work.

When you try to do anything without a clear sense of purpose or objective, you can bet it’s going to fail.  The same can be said for marketing your small business.

In the next week or so I’ll be sharing some specific ideas and action steps you could take to help you implement a powerful, profit producing marketing strategy that will create new customers and clients for you, so stay tuned!