The Wax Blog

I know it seems like a lot of wordplay, but I can’t stress enough the need to pull your strategies out of…well, wherever you can. Seriously most of us are probably  trying tactical stuff as we think of it. If it works, we continue. If not, we discontinue. But without strategy that requires a real knowledge of your desired customer, we never really know why one thing works and another doesn’t. That is what makes marketing seem so “squishy”.

With tactics, whether it’s advertising in a new magazine because the rep won’t leave you alone, or sponsoring your first event, there’s an element of closing your eyes and making a wish. When you select tactics that fit into well thought-out strategies, you can feel confident that at least you’re in the ballpark.

In case you were wondering, here are MY strategies for 2012: (more…)

Don’t feel dumb if you ask this question. We took a few weeks in my masters program at WVU to dive into this very question. In marketing, almost everything is squishy and this is probably the squishiest part.

I bopped around my favorite sites and didn’t find anyone with a really concrete definition of “strategy” vs “tactic” (even the dictionary is pretty ambiguous) so let’s work with this one:  (more…)

It’s January 9th and I’m having a hard time believing that it’s been over a month since I asked you to create your “best tactics” list.  CRA-ZEE how time flies during the holidays. So, did you do it? Have you trashed any old things that you really couldn’t tell were creating customers or revenue for you? Wondering why the hell I asked you to do that and never followed up?

It’s really hard to focus on strategy when you’re juggling a million things a day. But you have to. Sometimes it’s just easier to review the tactics that worked and build your strategy from the ground up, then pull strategies out of thin air. The purpose of this exercise is to look at the tactics that worked and decide on the overall strategy these tactics contribute to. THEN you can brainstorm more tactics that fit into that strategy. Thereby giving you a much more targeted approach that has a higher likelihood of success.  (more…)