GI said it, GI back again on GI said it where I break down my perspective on different topics. And today I wanted to talk about basically how to develop a strategy to achieve your goals. Because one of the things that I deal with on a daily basis working as an advisor is I have to talk to different companies or different brands and they say, Hey, we want to be able to achieve this goal. We want to do this thing, or we want this increasing revenue. How do we do that? And that’s exactly what an actual strategy is. It’s a plan of what to do or a guideline or a roadmap of how to get to where you want to go. So say that you have a goal that you want to increase sales by, I don’t know, 200% next year. Then you need to have a strategic way of steps of what you’re going to do, in what order and in what way to achieve that, in order for it to be effective.

Now, a lot of people, they like to freestyle it, do it as they say organically and just kind of go about and see what happens. Yeah, you could do that. You’re probably going to waste a lot of money. You’re going to possibly waste a lot of time as well as something that I’m very, very conscious of, a lot of energy, and if you are dealing with a business or anything that’s going to have some type of monetary feedback or something that you need to get back, you need to be efficient with that, and you need to make sure that you’re making the right moves at the right time and in the right way. So that way you’re getting the most out of that. So for today, I wanted to break down essentially how I actually develop a strategy. I will say this directly, it’s not a skill that everyone has.
Some people are very good at strategy and some people are much better to say the tactics because the strategy involves seeing the big picture. You have to be able to see all these different variables and most importantly how it’s going to play out in the future. So certain people have that ability to be able to do that while other people have a much a greater skill at things in the present. Even as I do strategy for my clients, that’s my wheelhouse. But if they had me do something where it’s more so just the present or I’m not the best at that, but essentially how I do it, it’s always going to start the same way. It’s going to start with observing. In this case for my clients, it’s called analysis. It’s going to start with doing an audit of their business or their brand, checking out their brand, their website, some of the copy, there’s something called brand positioning, which is like their mission statement, their value proposition, their brand tone.

Also researching on some of their audience and such, which we’ll get into that in a second. But I want to learn everything that I can about that particular brand or that business so that I am familiar with not only who they are, but also the potential pitfalls, strengths, weaknesses, et cetera for that business or that brand. Now, after I do an actual audit and I do the analysis and I’m understanding a lot more of that brand and what they’re offering and the products that they offer, then I’m going to go ahead and begin doing some of the analysis and some of the research on the market itself. I want to know, okay, the industry that they’re in, who are their competitors? And this is the big one, their audience. Who’s their audience? What do they like, what do they not like? How do they buy?

What are their preferences? You need to understand who you’re trying to sell to or who you’re trying to inspire or teach or educate. You need to understand that in order to be effective. So I would go through all of that just so I could understand the business or the brand as well as their market and their audience. Now, once I have an understanding, that’s where the talent part comes in, you’ll pretty much see a picture like, okay, this is what we need to do moving forward, but that’s still not the part where you design the actual strategy itself. The next one after that is the goal. You need to figure out what are you trying to achieve. A lot of people will hop right in, just start, okay, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. Well hold up. What’s your goal? What are you trying to achieve?

Because the first thing I’m going to check for is, is that realistic? Given that I’ve learned about your business, I’ve learned about your brand, learned about what you’re offering, your product as well as your resources, your budget. Is it realistic for the particular goal that you have to be able to actually achieve that? And if not, we need to have a talk and restructure some things or at least adjust some of the expectations to make sure that we’re dealing with the same reality here of what is possible for you and your particular situation. Now, after you have the goals and everything’s good to go and you see that it is possible, that’s when you start designing that strategy and it’s going to start top down. So you’re going to be looking at, okay, first let me fix some of the actual problems that are there with the brand.

Is the website on point? No. Okay, we probably need to redesign that, so let’s revise it. Let’s see what we can do. Is the logo decent enough that people would connect with it? No. Okay, Nia, just that. What about your messaging? Is that something people can emotionally connect with? Oh yeah, it’s very logical. That’s cool. But a lot of people buy emotionally. Can they emotionally connect with that? If not, then we need to rework that as well. And I do spend a good amount of time on the value proposition. That’s basically like, what’s your pitch? What are you offering? What are you doing? Why are you different? I spend a good amount of time on that to make sure that they have a clear understanding of what they’re offering and why they’re different and why people should go with them. And if you have all those things set and it’s feeling pretty good and everything’s been, I say fixed, fixed to where it’s acceptable enough to begin moving forward with the strategy or business, okay, now we’re going to go ahead and start dealing with the individual tactics that are there.

So I would actually begin designing out tactics that compliment each other. That is where the difference lies for people who come in and say they do strategy versus people whose talent it is to do strategy because they will choose individual specific little tactics, but they don’t fit together. They don’t compliment each other. I want every single tactic to build on another one. So that essentially I get an exponential return on whatever that investment is. Meaning if I’m putting work into say, social media and I’m running ads at the same time, I want those two to work together so that I get a much bigger reaction or much better result than if I did them individually. So that’s where kind of the art comes in for that. And yeah, I would have the channels, it might be social media if they’re dealing with that. It might be ads, it might be influencers, it could be SEO, which is search engine optimization.
So if you’re searching on Google, that’s how you show up in Google. I might do some email campaigns to go ahead and get them to build up some of their subscribers. Reason being people like, why would you do email that’s super old? Well, it has the highest ROI return on investment of any other marketing channels. So yeah, I would definitely focus on that. And that’s actually another good thing to mention. I’m usually going to reach for and focus on the things on the tactics or the channels that are high ROI. And those are usually going to be like email, SEO content ads, things that yes, they may cost some money and they may take some investment and time, but they usually pay back pretty well. And usually those things cost money. It is just what it’s welcome to business. So once I have those high ROI things, then I start supplementing with things especially that’ll help the brand.

Because one of the big differences between marketing and branding is that marketing, you’re essentially going to the people. It takes a lot of energy to go to people and also a lot of money you have to reach them, reach them, reach them, reach them. And sometimes people don’t want to be reached. So I sometimes like to focus on the brand and branding so that you can make people come to you. That’s what branding is. You create a public image or perception in which people connect with and then they want to come to you. I make sure that we have some tactics mixed up in there for that as well, so that we’re making the most, if we’re going to people, we’re also getting people coming to us. That’s big. That’s what I did previously for the recording studio, in which case it came to the point where a hundred percent of the actual clients came to us.

We didn’t go to any of ’em and it was a beautiful thing. It took a while to get there and it took a lot of testing and strategizing, but once we found that formula, a hundred percent the people came to us. So you want to make sure that you have that balance between building that brand and people coming to you and you still reaching out to new customers. So after you have the actual strategy set, you have some different tactics and you break it down too, like, Hey, social media, I want to post on Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9:00 AM because that’s when people are doing this thing and I need it to be this type of content with this call to action of coming and subscribing to my email newsletter. You need to get specific, know what you’re doing for that, and you would break all those things down, not just for yourself, but if you ever want to hire someone or bring in a contractor or something to do it, they know exactly what they need to do.

They know what the expectations are. And the most important part, your strategy is actually being executed. That’s really important. So after you have those pieces in there, then you probably want to go ahead and work out how do you keep track? How do you know that you’re on track? How do you know that you’re successful? And that’s something called KPIs, key performance indicators, and some of those things are, say views could be one click through rate, CTR, that’s another one. How many people are clicking on your ad or your offer conversions? One of the most important things, like how many people are actually buying what you’re selling, that would be really important. So sales obviously and conversions. Open rate in terms of the email themselves, do they actually read the email that I sent out? That’s real important. You want to know some of these indicators, not just for the heck of it in progress, yes, definitely for the progress, but also if you’re good with analytics, you know how to read it like a book and it tells you what to do, right?

So some good examples. Open rate, say you have a low open rate, immediately I’m thinking, okay, something’s wrong with the subject title on the email you sent out, so fix that. Say you have a low click through rate. Either they don’t care about your offer that you’re offering or the copy kind of sucks and you got to work on that particular thing. Say on a website, the bounce rate, people were coming in and leaving immediately, alright, we got a problem on the page. You’re not vibing with the offer or with what you’re actually saying in there, so it tells you what to fix, and that’s a beautiful thing. You don’t have to go in blind. Now experience, I’ll still go with that over all the analytics every single day because it’ll tell you how things are going to change and how people work in general.

Once you understand the psychology of people, you can probably go ahead and you can work without the analytics. I still like working with the analytics, but you can work without it because you understand the core thing, which are people themselves. Now you done work through the actual audit, you work through the analysis, the market research, also the strategy and the tactics and the individual tasks or initiatives or things you need to do for the tactics and also your KPIs. Once you have all those pieces, bare bones, you’re pretty much good to go. Can you add in a couple additional things? Yeah, you can, but for the most part, you have what you need to move forward, and now it’s just time to execute. And that’s the last part that I’m going to talk about for this. You need some type of task management or project management system to track this.

The reason being is because one, after you finish with your marketing strategy, you built out the whole thing. You want to build it in a system like go ahead and write it down and get it in a system so that you can just follow it. You don’t want to be thinking about this every single day. I want to think about it one time, load it in, it tells me what I need to do on what day. You can schedule these things or make them repeat, and you just go ahead and execute that. The second reason why I like doing that, especially if I work with a team, is accountability. You’re able to essentially track, Hey, what’s going on with this person? Are they executing this? Why is this late? What’s happening with that? You can communicate on there, you can leave comments, you can do all kinds of things.

You can track time. It allows you to make sure that you’re being efficient in your actual operation. And I’ll say the one that I use is called teamwork. Love it. I’ve used it for years and years and years and it’s wonderful. I will say it’s not for everyone because it’s an actual project management system. Sometimes it might just be easier to use a regular task management system, which is not so heavy. Oh, by the way, my new kitten that I just got, just jumped on my back. Hello. Hey, Maya, you want to say hello to everybody while I’m sitting here doing the podcast? Oh, there’s that little girl. Oh, there we go. All right. So she likes it too. She likes that if you guys go in, you execute your strategy, make it happen, then you can start working towards your goals in a very efficient and effective way.
I think that’s most important. Yes, you agree too, as you’re knocking down all my stuff. Thank you. So guys, you already know if you want to go and check out for this podcast as well as the blog that have set the books, any of that, all you got to do is gi set it.com. You go there, click listen. And the most important thing, if you actually enjoy this and you learn something from this, subscribe, please go ahead and do that. And that way I can see out new stuff that we got going on. I appreciate the support and I think that that’s the best way that we can move forward as a whole for people in this crazy world. With everything going on is supporting each other. All right, GI said it. GI right here. I’m out. And now a word from our sponsor. I’m just kidding. It’s just me looking for an advisor. GI offers advisory services for marketing and branding, music industry, careers and audio projects for individuals and businesses. Visit GI griffin.com for more info.