Think about your marketing the way Chinese General Sun Tzu thought about war: "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
I recently asked a fellow consultant what marketing challenges and mistakes he thought service firms most often face. He gave two answers:
1. Firms wrap themselves in details that don’t make a difference. They hem and haw over whether the trim of their website should be royal blue or lime green or whether their sales letters should end with “sincerely” or “best regards.” Those things don’t affect a prospect’s choice to work with a firm.
Nothing is ever going to be perfect, and perfection in your eyes may not be perfection in your clients’. Focus on the 80% of the work that is going to make a difference—the list, the offer, and the follow-up. The other 20% is just going to drag you down and stall your marketing programs.
2. Firms “do marketing” without thinking about how it fits into the big picture.
We’ve all been in the situation where five big client engagements end at once, and all of a sudden, the consultants, accountants, lawyers, or other practitioners at a firm don’t have any work waiting for them. So we start marketing, without an overall plan for how each tactic works together. (After all, it’s better to do “something,” right?) What this often leads to is disjointed efforts and campaigns that yield poor results for the firm.
Ask yourself, “How does this campaign fit with our overall growth goals and plan? If we were to spend the marketing dollars we are investing in this campaign into something else, could we get better results?
Let the answers to these questions drive your action.
In your marketing, stay focused on the big picture—the 80%, the overall business strategy, the growth goals—and employ only those tactics that will help you get there. As the Chinese General Sun Tzu said, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
