You Won’t Get Anywhere Without A Strategy

I get a lot of questions from wedding professionals that sound a lot like this:

“How do I get more likes on Facebook?”

“How do I get more comments on Instagram?”

“How do I get more repins on Pinterest?”

There is a huge problem with questions like this – they are all focused on the wrong thing.

A lot of wedding professionals get obsessively focused on the tactics when really none of that matters without a strategy. It’d be like me dumping out the Lego set for the Death Star and not giving you the instructions or the picture of what it’s supposed to look like. Sure you’re doing work putting stuff together, but you have no idea if you’re moving toward your goal because you don’t know what the goal is.

What is the difference between strategy & tactics?

Tactic – the specific practical tasks you do each day. Some examples include writing blog posts, posting to Facebook, replying to emails, making appointments with potential clients.

Strategy – the strategy is your game plan, your road map, your battle plan. It’s the higher level view (beyond the day to day stuff) intended to help you achieve your goals.

Your strategy is where you want to go. Your tactics are the intentional steps you take to get there.

The problem is, most people don’t use tactics in this intentional way and they just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks and wonder why nothing does.

Let’s say you want to book 20% more weddings than you did last year. That’s a great goal. Your strategy might look something like this:

1. Drive traffic to website

2. Increase the number of website visitors that actually contact to book a consultation

3. Increase referrals from previous clients

As you can see, these are high level less tactical statements and they are going to inform your tactics so you really can’t have effective tactics without a strategy.

Here is how you’d take the pieces of your strategy and figure out what your tactics should be.

In order to drive traffic to my website I’m going to…

• Write weekly blog posts about questions my ideal clients ask and share them across my social media profiles.
• Pin each of my blog posts.
• Drive people to subscribe to my email list so I can email them with new content and drive them back to my site.
• Write 1 guest post per month for another blog that my ideal client reads.
• Speak to my previous customers to find out why they chose to work with me so I know how to market & position myself.
• Use Edgar to make sure that my old blog posts get shared in addition to my new ones.
• Experiment with Facebook ads to drive traffic to blog posts.
• Participate in Twitter Chats and share links to my blog posts during the chats.
• Post to Instagram each day and include a call to action to drive people to my website.
• Join Book More Weddings Academy in October to learn how I can be attracting and converting more visitors into customers.

See what I mean? If you didn’t know what the objective was (driving more traffic to your website), you wouldn’t have chosen these tactics and for that reason, you wouldn’t get the results you want.

Tactics are sexy and they’re fun to talk about but unless you know WHY you’re doing those tactics, they don’t matter. You’ll never get anything out of those tactics without knowing why you’re doing them.

Now that you know the difference between tactics and strategy, take a moment to ask yourself why you’re doing each tactic that you do during the course of a day.

You may find that you’re doing things that don’t matter and then you can drop them and free up your time to do something more important. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, take a step back and think about what you’re working to achieve. Then it’s time to see if your tactics support that strategy or just waste your time.