How to build a bare minimum marketing strategy

Building a marketing strategy can feel like a headache, especially when you don’t know where to start. At recent coworker Joe Glover shared a framework to build one from scratch.

Hey.

Hello, everyone. It’s lovely to see you all again. Thank you for taking the time. I’m going to try my best because I’m aware. Lunch things. I’m not going to be too long, but I want to speak today about how to build the bare minimum marketing strategy. And I’m going to start with a little bit of the emotional reason why.

And then hopefully over the duration of the next 20, 40 minutes or whatever I’ve got, we’re actually going to do it. We’re going to do it together. So by the end, you’ll actually have a thing which will be useful I hope. So my name is Joe Glover. I am 12,355 days old, and it is lovely to be with you all here today.

Today we’re going to be speaking about how to build the bare minimum marketing strategy. But before we do, let’s go back to 2016, the halcyon days of 2016. Back when I had hair, no children and therefore slept through the night. It was in 2016 and I remember them well. It was the time when I hit my marketing rock bottom, and it was the reason I hit my marketing rock bottom was that I was a solo marketer.

I was working in a small company, and on this particular day I was driving through the hills of Ireland, and I was sat in a car next to my boss who had made me drive, despite being sort of like 23 and him being 40 something or whatever. But instead of it being beautiful and green, it was rainy and dull and I was on our way to a five star hotel where we were going to run this conference, and it was surrounded by luxury.

But my goodness, I was miserable, I was miserable, and I was sad. And I remember my boss being sat next to me, and I was stuck there driving the car. And I just remember turning to him and it was it was three person company. So I was like the solo marketeer in this operation. I just remember saying to him, I don’t know how we’re going to get to where we want to.

What we’re doing doesn’t seem to be landing. And you and me, we have a communication problem. And that was rough because, like, I’m sure that there’s people in the room right now who, like, are probably doing a bunch of stuff, but you’re like, why am I doing this? You know, like what? What am I aiming towards? There’s probably people in this room who are, like, doing things lots and lots of things and constantly feel busy, but like without a specific direction or focus.

And it just feels like you’re spinning the wheels and like, I think all of us probably know the feeling of like posting something on LinkedIn and then getting like a like or nothing and like thinking on a very human level, you know, am I doing something wrong here? Or I’m sure that most people in the room will sort of have the feeling of working with someone and you’re like, oh my God, I have no idea to have how to have a common language for us to be able to speak and understand each other and have a conversation which is grounded in something which is real and jointly understood.

And so that’s why I feel quite passionate about this word, which is strategy. But strategy is something which can be loaded in quite a lot of ways because it can feel complicated or overwhelming or difficult or, you know, just just something you don’t want to do because you’ve got 15,000 other things to do today. But I do think it’s a bit of an antidote to those feelings that I just spoke about.

But in order to be able to understand what strategy is, then we kind of need to be able to look to the definitions. What are we actually trying to achieve today? So the first thing that I feel quite passionate about is this idea that Michael Porter speaks about when he speaks about strategy, which is about strategy is about saying no.

So my co-founder is the best example of this. So he is like a a self-confessed and this is the language he uses, not the language I use ADHD brain person who comes up with 10,000 ideas a day, and he needs a filtering mechanism to be able to say yes or no to something. And in a way, our strategy becomes that thing.

Mark Ritson will define a strategy, a good strategy by these three things. Who are we going to target? What is our position to that target, and what is my objective to reach those people? And to those three questions, and you’re on your way to understanding what you would like to achieve and how you would like to achieve it.

But it can feel complicated, can feel difficult. So today we’re going to focus on something which is like the bare minimum. This is like, let’s get rocking and rolling. If we don’t feel like we have a strategy for ourselves right now, then let’s just build something that is quick, dirty, but gives us what we need to to take the step forward that we might need in our businesses in there, our marketing activity going forwards.

So it says at the top there it’s a session of four parts. It’s a session of three parts. I lied in my in my titles. I’m going to introduce you to the bare minimum marketing strategy. We’re then going to start building it. And then if we have any questions at the end will take them. So part one let’s introduce you to the bare minimum marketing strategy.

I’m not going to make you do a drum roll because this is it. Thanks, Mel. This is this is how I would sort of start if I, if I started on day one of looking to build a strategy and I didn’t have one, this would be the graphic that I would sort of look to give businesses. And it’s a funny old thing, because I developed this with an idea that it would probably be SMEs more than anything, but when I distributed it to large businesses as well, they said, we don’t have this either.

And so like it feels sometimes like, you know, we’re behind because we’re in these smaller businesses. We’re not nobody is as organized as you think they are. But this as a starting place to build a strategy, feels like a really good place. So let’s speak about the component parts. And as I say, we’re going to work through it as we go through today’s session.

So at the top we have a business or a marketing goal. This is kind of what it says on the tin and particularly for the folks in the room. It’s a little bit Ron Seal. It’s like, you know, you’ve got a goal. But I think the important thing to point out at this point is like quite often if we’re in a larger business, then a marketing goal is going to serve the wider business goal.

There’s probably a layer on top if you’re in your SMEs, you’re sort of solopreneur thing. Your marketing goal can often be the same as the business goal, if that makes sense. So if you’re in a larger business, start with the business goal. But if you’re in a small business, I think they’re often the same thing. We then go into like the strategic elements of these things, like what are we actually trying to achieve?

So we want to identify the problem that we solve. And this actually has nothing to do with the the company that we work for. It’s about understanding the market. We want to stand who we’re trying to help. Very specifically more based on behaviors rather than like age groups, demographics. And then we want to know the idea that we want to put in their mind.

As marketers, we call this positioning. And then finally, we’ve got some tactical stuff. This is like how we go about achieving what we’ve set out in the middle layer. So we’ve got awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, advocacy. This is the stuff that stops you spinning your wheels because it gives you purpose. So when you post on LinkedIn in the morning, you say, I’m going to do an awareness post today rather than I’m going to post on LinkedIn.

But we’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing for all of this is like, strategy is not like something that sits in a document, you know, like, we don’t come out of this today and we go, okay, cool, I’ve done it. And now let’s go back to my emails. This starts to inform every bit of decision making that we make going forwards.

And that’s important because this becomes a cyclical thing that feeds back into the business and so on and so forth. As I say, there’s some assumptions and caveats. This is quick and dirty. This is like if you don’t have anything, you’ve now got something. We’re going to work through it and create it. And as I say by the end of the session hopefully you’ve got some direction.

So part two let’s work through the strategies together. I need you to get your phones out if possible, because we’re going to do some QR code goodness. So the first thing I need you to do is scan this QR code. Because this is going to take you somewhere interesting. Hopefully.

Okay. I’m really sorry.

This is the QR code you really need.

And this will take you to a GPT. So in the background I’ve built a GPT, which will hopefully take us through the process of building the bare minimum marketing strategy, but not just one that is going to be built in generic ways, but one that is going to be built for yourselves today in this session. So the first thing you’ll see on the GPT as you log in is there’s a little prompt that sort of says, hello there.

I’m your GPT. If you just click that, that will start the process. And we’ll keep referring back to this throughout the duration of today’s session. So as I say, by the end of the session you’ll have your strategy built out for you.

I’m smiling because there’s a massive assumption that we’ve all got pretty apps on my phone. It’s way over there.

Oh, really? Sorry. I can send it afterwards as well.

So what we’re going to be doing and we’ll do phones down for the moment as we as we go. Because as I say, we’ll refer to it. But my job for the rest of this talk is to define things. And then we’ll refer back to the GPT and give you some time to fill it in for yourselves. So let’s start with the business or marketing goal, the top level that we were speaking about in the bare minimum marketing strategy.

So as I said already, business goals are often the same as marketing goals in the situations that we’re in. But when we go about defining our goals, then we need to be specific, because so many times as business owners and I do this myself as a business owner will say, my goal is I don’t know, you know, to get out there or, you know, to do more social media stuff or something like that.

And like, that’s a really good place to start with, because at least you’re acknowledging that I would like to get out there a little bit more, and I would like to do some more social media, but what it doesn’t do is give you anything specific to go at. Like if you say, how do you know you’re going to achieve that?

You’ve got yourself out there a little bit more, it’s a little bit tricky. And so there’s like so many different ways you can set goals. But the easiest one is smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time related. All of a sudden, rather than a goal that looks like we want to get ourselves out there, we’ve got a goal that says from our current place of 100 visits per day, I want to move this number to 1000 website visits per day by a specific date.

We are giving ourselves a goal which is not no longer generic. We’re giving ourselves selves a goal which is specific, and in that specificity, you have the option to to spur action from, you know, do some social media goes to have 80 conversations with our ideal customers again by a specific date or sell more tickets goes from increase the conversion rate on our website from 1% to 2% by a specific date.

Again, we’ve got that specificity. It really, really helps. Now there are some watch outs when we start off with the goal setting stage. Because inevitably, as business owners, so many of us will want to make our goal sales, which is cool because that is what we all want to achieve, right? You know, I have 100 partnership conversations and inevitably they say we just want to sell more.

And they go. Of course you want to sell more. Money is great, but we need to do some things along the way to get to where we want to be. So your goal isn’t ultimately sales in the first instance. Your goal is ultimately sales. But we need to set the things before the second watch out. Particularly if we’re working in businesses with other people.

Is that a marketer or a small business owner will go off and do the strategy by themselves and then return to the rest of the team and say, I’ve done it, I’ve done our strategy, and people look at us and they go, well, that’s not what I wanted. That’s not what I wanted to achieve. And particularly in a junior senior relationship where you’re wanting to impress, if you go to your boss and say, I’ve built our strategy and they go, actually, we’re going to do this thing, then you’ve wasted your time.

So strategy isn’t built in a silo. So asking lots and lots of questions about what we want to achieve is going to be important. And thirdly, when it comes to goal setting, a lot of us have the tendency to set way too many goals. And it’s just hard. You know, I’d suggest 1 to 3, no more than three goals to be working on at any one time.

It just makes it a lot more consistent. You can focus your activity and off you go. I’m going to move past this. So in an example here, I’ve said our goal is to create 50 net new customers by the end of 2025. But this is our opportunity to head back into the GPT and start setting your own goal.

So you should have a prompt for those of you who can get in, which says something along the lines of fill in the gaps on the type of goal that you would like to achieve for your own business. So if you want to take two minutes for that, I’ll play some music, and then and then I’ll do a I’ll, we’ll get going again.

So feel free if you’d like to. It’s very optional by the way.

Yes please.

It will be that you don’t have Wi-Fi here.

Ironically. So whatever’s on my phone.

Nursery rhymes.

It’s my Warner.

Actually, that’s not downloaded either. I thought it was. There you go, Peppa Pig.

Baby.

Yes, of course you can.

Oh, there you go.

Matilda.

Matilda.

So don’t jump ahead to step two just yet. So if you’ve got a step one sorted, then you can hang out.

Right. We’ll do phones down and we’ll move on to the next section. Sorry, showtunes is what I have downloaded, apparently for my daughter. So. So there we go. So let’s move into the middle section of the bare minimum marketing strategy, the strategic elements of what we’re hoping to achieve to be able to write down. So first of all, we need to know what is the problem that we’re looking to solve.

Now, for a lot of us in our businesses that may feel really apparent very, very quickly, but the first thing I’d encourage us to do is actually step out of our businesses when we think about the problems that we solve, because quite often we’ll jump to some conclusions and not really know without asking folks first, but doing proper research.

So my first suggestion would absolutely be to be thinking about their problem, not your problem. So think about your customer again, it’s professor Mark Ritson. We’ll call this something called market orientation. The idea that you’re orientated your product and business to the problem of the market, not the problem that you feel. Because ultimately, if we want to be growing our business, then we need people to pay for our stuff.

So we need to be useful for them, not for you. To give an example of this. Like we do this all the time, but like it’s a small semantic thing. But so many of us as marketers, when we speak about our products, we start with a line of, we’re so excited to announce whatever thing. And it’s like, who fricking cares if you’re excited?

I’m reading this thing because I want to benefit, which is a selfish mindset, perhaps, but also it’s wasted words in my opinion. So tell me why I should be excited about reading about your thing. It’s a mindset shift that is fundamentally about writing for the the customer, not for your own benefit. So how do you find out what people want?

Well, first of all, find the people who are your target market and ask them, what do you want? And actually, the amount of times you go into research interviews, whether it’s formal or informal, and someone says a nugget of gold, but you never expected to hear come out of their mouth, but you ask someone something and then they they say that language and you’re like, you know what?

That’s right. And that’s wonderful. And I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion myself just starting from that place. If you ask five potential customers, you will get five different perspectives and inform what you want to do with your marketing, I guarantee it. The second thing that you could do is just ethnographic research. So what does that mean? It means watching people in their context interact with the thing or the problem, which you which you are trying to solve.

So for example, as you know, if you’re if you worked in retail just watching people in the shops, what are they doing? How are they orientated around the problem? It may give you some ideas of like what you can do to help them solve their problems. And then third, secondary sources, stuff like Amazon reviews, Google reviews, Reddit, whatever it may be.

You can go in and read these things and people are telling people what they think about your competition. They’re good points, they’re bad points, etc., etc. all of a sudden you’ve got a wealth of information about what people care about. You’re solving people’s problems, not your own problem. You’re understanding them, not understanding you. Another way to think about the problems that we solve is a framework called Jobs to be done.

It’s built up by this guy called Clayton Christensen, certainly popularized by Clayton Christensen. And it’s this idea that, like our products and services are there to help them achieve a specific goal or solve a problem or fulfill a need. So it’s not just like buying a product. You don’t just buy a pair of trainers, you buy a pair of trainers because you want to go running, or you buy a t shirt because you want to look cool.

So there’s like a secondary thing. There’s something which you think people want to do when buying your products or service. They’re hiring your products or service to achieve a specific goal, and jobs to be done can be broken into lots of different things. Folks can want to feel better in society. They want to fill a functional need, they got a pain point, etc., etc. but they’ve got lots and lots of different ways that your product or service can help them.

So we’re now going to head back into the GPT. I’m going to give you 90s this time in the in the spirit of expediting my talk. And so with that in mind, if you head in for 90s and we’re going into step number two, which is all about solving the problem of, of your target market,

right?

Phones down. Sorry, I know I’m moving this through things quickly. There will be time afterwards. I mean, the GPT is available afterwards as well. So feel free to keep it. So in an example here, someone wants to feel more happy. They want to be able to twin. I gave this talk previously and gave an example of my own.

This is the first time we’re trying the GPT method, so I don’t know whether it’s working for you or not, but in this particular example, it was a dog clothing company and they wanted to be able to twin their their clothing with their dog, which would make them feel more happy. So there we go. So next, next section.

Who are we trying to help? So we’re rapidly going through the strategy part.

There’s there’s an idea that sits within marketing. Again I’m speaking to with an awareness that there’s marketers in the room but also non marketers in the room as well. But there’s an idea within marketing that called personas, which is this idea of a fictionalized version of a human being or a potential customer, which you have in mind when you are building your marketing activity.

So, you know, you may think of Mel, who is actually a real human being, but you may think that you are writing to Mel because you only want to write to completely wonderful people. Or you can write to Christian because you want to see the most wise human beings on the planet, whatever it may be. But there’s a downfall when when we build our personas, which is that so often in building personas, a lot of folks will fall into the trap of purely basing it on demographics.

And by demographics we mean stuff like where people live, the jobs that they do, the age that they have, etc., etc.. What you see with this graphic here is that like when you do a demographic approach solely, then Ozzy Osbourne looks exactly the same as Prince Charles. They are born at the same time. They lived in similar areas.

They have similar interests like dogs, etc. obviously very, very different people. So instead of solving for demographics, I think it’s often better that we start thinking about things that are way to to be small, to be showing you on the screen like this. But we start thinking about the thoughts that are in people’s heads or the behaviors that they exhibit out there in the world.

So are the people curious, like the marketing meet up, the company I run. I often define it’s marketers who are curious and lovely. That is enough for us to go out because like our tone of voice, etc. we’re speaking to education and connection in lots of different ways, but there’s so many different ways you can slice this. And again, I’ll share the slides afterwards so you can start asking the questions for yourself.

But the encouragement really at this point is rather than thinking about, I am targeting males between 18 and 30 who live in Ely, we start thinking about, I’d love to speak to the most curious people in the world who happen to buy watches and I don’t know, like skiing or something like that. I don’t know, that’s a bad example.

That’s very niche. What this ends up meaning is that we end up with a group of people who have that type of thing. So in the terrible example I just gave of people who like skiing and watches, there will be a series of subsections that sit within that. These are things called segments. So if you, for example, like your skiing and you like your watches, but then there’s also a group of people who happen to be living in the UK, and there’s a different group of people living in the US.

You may say, I’m going to target purely the UK people, which gives you a segment, a very specific tight group of people to go after. Ultimately, this means that you start building a very tight knit group of people that you go after with your marketing, rather than saying 18 to 30 males who live in Ely. You can start saying they behave in this way.

They think this way. They happen to live in the UK. And I’d suggest a fairly easy way to pick the segment that you want to go after is how many of them, and how much money do they have to spend? Again, I feel like I’m being very like commercial in this talk, but hey, it’s marketing. We want to make money as well.

So let’s focus on that segment. So.

I think that’s the next section of the GPT. So I’ll give you another 90s I’ll try and choose some better music. But if you head into stage number three then we’ll start building our segments. There is a caveat in this stage that like this would totally be informed by like research and stuff like that. So at this point we start becoming a bit more illustrative rather than saying this is exactly what you need to do.

Also, I think it’s interesting which ept that you’re probably all getting quite different answers right now, and I have no control over that. So I’m interested whether this is being useful or not. But we’ll see. So we start building out the segments idea. Having blabbed on for 30s there, I’ll give you another minute or so and we’ll go.

We’ll keep on going forwards.

Cool phones down.

Let’s get to the final section of strategy, which is all about positioning, the idea of positioning. And when I want to illustrate the position, the idea of positioning that I can think of. No better way than this quote from a guy called Chris Anderson who leads Ted talks. Chris Anderson says that the idea of a great talk is to be able to build an idea in the minds of the audience, and I love that because it speaks to building an idea in the mind.

It’s a wonderful illustration of how this stuff can work. Obviously, we’re now bringing this into our products and services and our businesses. We’re trying to build an idea in the minds of the segments that we’ve now defined about the problems that they have. We are now presenting ourselves as a solution to their problem for a specific group of people, building an idea that we are the people who can help them solve said problem.

So we come to this idea of positioning, the idea of building a an image in the mind of the customer about what we are, who we are, what we look like, the services we offer, etc., etc..

And there’s a couple of ways of doing this. I’m going to move past salience. There’s a couple of ways of doing this. The first is a concept called distinctiveness. What this means is you are appearing as yourself. Now this is a Byron Sharp quote. Here’s another professor. What do I mean by appearing as yourself? So appearing as yourself means you are consistently showing up in the same shape.

I often where I wear glasses, I am about six foot ish, so I am appearing as myself in our brands. That could be your color palette. It could be your logo, it could be the shape of your packaging. It could be any number of things. We’ll get onto some examples in a minute that is appearing as yourself. This is one way to position yourself where you’re saying, I am here, I am in the market and I am.

This is what I am. Another way to position yourself is to be differentiated. Now, we’re not speaking about being entirely different from anyone, ever. It’s quite hard to be different from anyone, ever, because there’s lots of things out there. But what we’re speaking about is being relatively differentiated, better, worse, bigger or smaller, etc., etc. so I’ve got some examples.

So on the distinctiveness, this is us appearing as ourself Tiffany Blue is a distinctive brand asset. You’ve got the Manchester United logo. You’ve got stuff like the Starbucks mug. If you’ve ever walked down the high street, you smell lush before you see it. That is a distinctive brand asset in the alternative way where we’re speaking about differentiation. What we have here is a graph.

And again, it’s too small. But you see that asana has compared themselves to Monday or rather the other way around Monday. And they’ve chosen a bunch of things here that say meet requirements, ease of use, ease of admin, quality of support, ease of doing business with. So they’ve chosen five metrics there, and they’ve put themselves in green because they’ve said we are better than asana at those things that is differentiated.

They’ve chosen some metrics to be differentiated from their competition on. So when we’re speaking about our positioning, then a lovely way to be able to do that is, say, what is distinctive about me and what is differentiated. All of a sudden, you start setting yourself apart from the competition because you are you, but you are also different. A lovely way of thinking about this again comes from professor Mark Ritson.

And he can be it can be a little bit brutal sometimes, but the idea is that Ritson proposes, is that nobody is thinking about your business. Nobody cares because we’re thinking about our kids, we’re thinking about our sore back. We’re thinking about that bill that we’ve got to pay. We’re thinking about our email that we’ve got to answer to.

We’re thinking about why it’s raining again. And so nobody is walking down the street thinking, tell you what, the marketing me up is great all the time. I love that thing 100% of the time. Of course they’re not. So what Ritson suggests is you have three brain cells dedicated to your business in the minds of your customer. That’s it.

That’s all you get. You get three brain cells and what do you want those three brain cells to say? Now that’s the question that you can answer with distinctiveness and differentiation. But if you start from that place of I have very limited space in the mind of my customer, what are those three things? What are those three things that come the moment someone wants a web dev, that they go Penny Pickering or a copywriter and they go, Mel, what are those three things?

So this is the crux of what we mean by positioning. So often we end up with something called a positioning statement. It’s a sentence or two that describes us how we’re different and how we’re distinct. That is the final section in the strategy bit of the GPT by nods by hand. Is the GPT worth continuing with in the talk?

Yes.

Oh, okay. Okay okay. Cool. If we do 60s on that and then we’ll move forward just just to allow us folks who are finding it useful.

Cool phones down. I’m really sorry. I know that was way too quick, but we’ll move into our last section all about tactics. So quite often if you’re not in marketing day to day, quite a lot of folks will confuse strategy with tactics. So this bit is the strategic element of what we speak about in marketing. This bit is the tactical bit of what we speak about in marketing.

So what do I mean by tactics? Well, notes that so far, at no point have I mentioned TikTok or Instagram or TV ads or indeed my favorite tactic of all carrier pigeon. All of these things are tactics. They are the tubes. They are the way in which we get the message out, which we’ve chosen to define in our positioning statement, which solves the problem for the segment that we’ve built, which solves the problem for the problem which we’ve identified, that solves the business goal.

So the tactics, they’re the things which get the word out the way that we show up. And they’re the thing which are the most popular thing to think about in our marketing so often. The problem with this, with our tactics is that so often we show up on Monday morning and say, we’re going to do some C.O. today.

And it’s like, well, why? We haven’t said why. And on Tuesday we’re going to do something to Graham. On Wednesday we’ll do an event and Thursday post on LinkedIn. And Friday you got to get down on Friday because that’s what Rebecca told us a long time ago. The thing that that’s lacking is purpose or clarity. And as a form of marketing manager, I didn’t have purpose and I didn’t have clarity in my action.

And so I just did stuff, and I felt so busy with my tactics that I felt like I didn’t have time. But the thing this model gives us is some purposeful clarity, so to speak, to five stages awareness, consideration. Purchase. Retention. Advocacy. Awareness. We’re making people aware that our product or service exists. Consideration. They’re aware we exist, but now they’re in the market and they’re like, oh, who’s out there?

Who should we see purchase? It’s about making the purchase process as easy as possible. Retention, keeping the customers you have vast, vastly, vastly underrated advocacy. Such a powerful way to turn your customers into the way to speak about and find your next customer for you. Huge. So instead of saying Monday, I’m going to do C.O., you can say, On Monday I’m going to do SEO because I think it’s going to help our brand awareness.

Instead of saying, On Tuesday, we’re going to do TikTok. You say on Tuesday, I think I’m going to do TikTok because I think it’s a bit further down and it’s a consideration tactic. All of a sudden, rather than just doing things, you’re doing things with purpose. You’re doing things with clarity and with purpose, and clarity gives you direction and movement.

If you move on to the next stage, you can even put goals next to those things. And so you can say, SEO, I want to see my organic search go up this year versus last, etc., which doesn’t seem to happen a lot these days, but, you know, so all of a sudden, instead of without purpose and we’re doing SEO, we go to doing SEO for reasons of awareness and from SEO to reasons of awareness.

We say, and we will judge success by the amount of organic growth. All of a sudden you’ve gone from something nonspecific to something very specific, something which gives, you know, clarity or purpose to something which is very purposeful and, you know, whether you’ve been successful or not. This, as I say, is the tactical stuff. This is the stuff which people really get excited about.

And so they should.

Is marketing exciting and it’s fun and it’s, you know, it’s good stuff. But by putting it in these buckets, I think it also gives you the best chance of succeeding. It also enables you to choose where you want to place your energy, because I bet there’ll be people in the room right now who sort of say, I’m actually pretty well known in my industry, but I’m not converting the right amount of clients.

And so if that’s the case, well, then maybe you shift your energy to the purchase stage and you say, okay, what are the tactics that I can use that will make people buy from me today, rather than putting my energy into my next TikTok video, which is going to make me more famous but won’t help my business. Generally speaking, when we speak about how to optimize the funnel, start from the middle.

Start from purchase. Start as close as you can to that point, because that’s going to be the thing which drives business as quick as it can for you, which will give you more bandwidth to be able to do the awareness stuff, the consideration stuff. So if you can optimize your purchase process for the folks who are already interested, I think that’s a good place to start.

So over the course of this session, I’m not going to ask you to do the tactics because it will ask you five questions now and ask you what you want to do in the awareness stage. Consideration, purchase, retention, advocacy will be here forever. At the end, you get a PDF that comes out and sort of says, this is the plan, but I’d encourage you to sort of think about those different stages and where you can place your energy and where you can place your tactics.

And in the end, we get a plan. At the top, we’ve said we want to achieve a specific goal. So all of a sudden we’ve got some clarity on that. We know, roughly speaking, what our business solves for people because we’ve asked them or we’ve watched them or we’ve read the stuff that they say, we know specifically who we’re going to solve it for, and we know the message that we would like to build in their brain.

And we’ve built out the tactical plan in which to reach them as a bare minimum, as a decent start. It feels like a good structure. So to wrap up, this is it business marketing goal. Those things, those things. Thank you very much. Cheers.