let’s talk strategy

The ubiquity of social media combined with an essentially non-existent barrier to entry for creating content means that more often than not content gets created first and the determination of whether or not it’s a good idea comes later.

As obvious as it sounds, I’ll just say out loud that this approach is backwards.

What this often comes down to is the age-old conflation of tactics with strategy.

Quick definitions:

A tactic is an action taken for the sake of its immediate result.

A strategy is a plan for implementing a series of tactics to achieve an ultimate goal.

Essentially, tactics are the “how” while strategy is the “why.”

Here are a handful of hypotheticals that might help illustrate the difference in the context of our media:

Tactics: “When does this video need to be posted?”
Strategy: “Why does this video need to be created?”

Tactics: “Should we update our feed weekly or monthly?”
Strategy: “Is a feed-based content platform the most appropriate way to publish our content?”

Tactics: “How can we make this more relatable?”
Strategy: “How do we want to be perceived?”

Notice that pretty much every tactical decision has a strategy assumption built into it.

Basically, you can either decide your strategy up front—in which case most of your tactical decisions will have ready-made answers; or your strategy will be revealed in retrospect as the result and sum of each individual tactical decision.

re: strategy

In response to my recent message about strategy, in which I said that every tactical decision has a strategy assumption built into it, I got this question from a fellow list member:

Good question!

Here was my response:

~ ~ ~

Here’s the thing . . .

A strategy is simply a plan for achieving an ultimate goal.

You have an ultimate goal for your business, so you have some kind of strategy for achieving it, even if you haven’t said it out loud or put it on paper. If you didn’t have any plan you wouldn’t take any action, so you wouldn’t have a business.

There are all kinds of strategies.

But not all strategies are winning strategies.

If you wrote down the strategy assumptions built into every one of your day-to-day decisions, would it look like a winning strategy?

“content marketing” is not a strategy

“Content marketing” is not a strategy because it doesn’t have an objective.

“We need to create content because everyone else is creating content” is not a sufficient motivational statement to help you make the real tactical decisions that will come when you begin to think about what kind of content you actually want to make.

Before you can create any kind of worthwhile content, you have to figure out why creating content is the best approach for your business in to begin with.

And here’s the key:

The best content strategy doesn’t start with why you should create content.
(Usually that just comes down to: “because I want more customers.”)

Rather, the best content strategy starts with why your customer should want to consume your content in the first place.

If you can figure that out, you’ll be more motivated to make the content, and customers will be more excited to engage with it.