Lessons In Business. #ThinkBigPicture

There’s an important distinction between strategy and tactics.

I’ve seen it happen many times already in my career. A business owner will come up with a wiz-bang social media strategy, create the content, publish, undertake paid advertising and at the end of it all, receive a result far from what they hoped.

Or even worse, make a Facebook post and hit the dreaded ‘Boost’ button. 🤦🏽‍♂️*facepalm*

To be fair, I understand why they’d like this to work, but as we’ve discussed in the office here at Feeney before, if you give it some thought you wouldn’t want these ‘easy’ solutions to work, otherwise, everyone would do it and reap the benefits.

Strategy, in my mind, comes first for any entity. It’s linked to a long-term aim that requires many moving parts to align to reach. It’s the overarching objective that you’re steering the ship towards.

Tactics on the other hand are the tools or actions that enable and propel an entity towards its strategic goals. They are levers you can pull to make things happen at a day-to-day level.

Both constantly need to be reassessed, but too often it seems tactics take the lead without a clear strategy. This ultimately leads to half-hearted attempts and little tangible benefit. Social media marketing is just one example, where many businesses jump in expecting solid returns because they posted a few images on a social media channel. In reality, this barely leaves a ripple as they have failed to understand the other tactical levers, and how they can align to achieve what they actually want to achieve.

Social media strategy should nest within a larger strategic picture for any business but often it stands alone as a ‘marketing strategy’ that lacks a proper, whole business view and objective.

One thing I believe we do very well at Feeney is create the groundwork from which to build and the creation of business strategy.

We work with clients to help them understand their business and in turn, shine a light on their potential strategic goals; goals that they often struggle to distill themselves. This is usually due to the business morphing over the years they’ve been involved, and they lose sight of where it’s been and where it’s headed.

Think about the big picture goals, then drill down into the actions you can take to make them a reality.