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RSSThe Dingoes Ate My Strategy
I went off on this topic at the recent SMX in Sydney. I was asked to present at a session that offered out-of-the-box PPC tactics. I hijacked the session and said that it's hard to know what out-of-the-box is until you've defined the box. Strategy defines the box. If you're building a house, strategy is the blueprint; tactics are the tools you use to put the house together. Apparently I scared a few Aussies by my impassioned plea not to confuse the two.
The reason for my rant? Because all too often in search we get enamored with a brand new tool and forget to look at the blueprint. This is not a new message for me. Check the byline blurb at the bottom of this column. It's been the same message since I started writing this column, almost 4 years ago now.
I don't think anyone disagrees with me that strategy is a good thing. But why does our focus so often slip from the strategic to the tactical? Why do we keep losing sight of the forest for the trees? Rick Tobin, our director of research, came up with one possible reason. Tactics are easy to own and even easier to delegate. They're a "tick off" item on our to-do list. Strategy requires more thought. It's a lot slipperier to get hold off.
The First Step is Admitting You Might be Making a Mistake
I tend to take a strategic slant when I present at conferences and shows. And because of that, I think I ask more from my audience. I'm asking them to question what it is they might be doing right now, because it might be the wrong thing. Strategy demands that you ask tough questions of yourself. It challenges your beliefs. And that's a hard thing to ask of humans. We're wired to ignore anything that might cause us to change our mind.
I know firsthand how tough it can be to keep focused on your strategy and to execute effectively against it. It's a constant challenge in my company, and the same is true for every company I know that values strategy. You have to think your way through this stuff. You can't do it on autopilot.
Tactical Mastery or Strategic Stumbling
It's a lot easier to focus on a tactic. We like to master things, and you can do this at a tactical level. You can be a great link builder, or PPC manager. You can become the wizard of analytics, or the master multivariate tester. And these are the things you'll find on the typical search conference agenda. I think it would scare the hell out of most attendees to go to a session titled "Strategic Soul Searching: Are All Your Marketing Efforts in Vain?" To be fair to the show organizers, most attendees come looking for tactics. Almost no one comes looking for strategy. They may think they're looking for strategy, but they've mixed up the terms.
Books like "Good to Great" and "Built to Last," as well as almost anything by Peter Drucker or Tom Peters, ask you to look at things from a strategic vantage point. Even Covey's "The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People" provides you with the strategic building blocks for a more effective personal life. In his books, Jim Collins warns that this is not a quick process. Companies can take a decade of dedicated persistent effort to really discover their soul and define their strategic direction. You can pick up a tactic in a 15-minute presentation, but a strategy takes a lot more time.
The Strategic Common Denominator
Personally, I've felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans. The more years I add to my CV, the more I realize we need to spend some time understanding the weird quirks and traits that make us all too imperfectly and irrationally human. And it's from that understanding that your strategy will eventually spring forth.
To wrap up for this week, I leave you with a quote from Sun Tzu, the military strategist:
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Meet Gord Hotchkiss at Search Insider Summit Utah!
Gord Hotchkiss will be there speaking during "Conference Opens and Opening Remarks" on December 03 at 8:45 AM. Top executives will be there. Will you?
Register today and save.
Register today and save.
RSS FEEDS
The failure to define a strategy prior to designing tactics is the biggest mistake in marketing - not just search.
People want to jump to the tactical stage because it is the fun stuff, the stuff that they can do, and see - they feel that they are getting somewhere, they are moving forward, they are out in the marketplace...but without any framework to determine whether it is the right tactic, the most effecient tactic in the first place, it is totally hit or miss on whether it will work.
I think part of the reluctance to get strategic is that the stepping off point is finding out everything you can about your customers - and importantly what they think about your product/service. That can be quite intimidating for businesses who have developed initially based on a product/service focus rather than satisfying an unfufilled need of customers.
With regard to the UK seminar on 'quick strategy', marketing hasn't changed - just the tools at our disposal. I think the speed of change is all to do with the tactics that we have at hand - not the strategy that we need to drive the process in the first place.
In the UK, the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) is about to run a seminar on 'quick strategy', based on the premise that the speed of change is such these days that it's better to get a speedy strategy that may be 80% than wait for 100% and get pre-empted by a competitor. Not entirely convinced by this, though I can see where they are coming from. seems to me that what they risk is finding a formula for tactics....
The other thing strategies get confused with, of course, is objectives - as in 'our strategy is to increase market share', which is at best half a strategy, though it does have elements of being one.
Another reason people tend to focus on tactics over strategy, or at least not link the two as closely as they should, is that the world typically provides much more immediate, tangible feedback on tactics than on strategies (which, by definition, are more complex and require multiple points of feedback to assess).
While the feedback on tactics can be direct, quantitative and objective, feedback can be just as compelling to people if it falls on the other end of the spectrum and is indirect, qualitative and subjective. What matters is that there's feedback - whether the numbers, other people, or both reinforce the activity.
I'm sure almost all of us have seen, and experienced in ourselves, the "tactical spiral" where feedback on a tactic is so engaging that we persist on the tactic rather than pulling perspective back out to ensure the tactical activities still align with strategy. Its hard to keep running back and checking in with the strategy when the world moves so quickly but, as in your Sun Tzu quote, its essential for rapid progress in the chosen direction.