Chapter 15 This is Marketing

Reaching the Right People

Let’s talk about 3 things here. Goals, Strategies and Tactics.

These are different from each other. Or you can say one is the sub part of other.

You have a goal for which you come up with a strategy and to implicate that strategy you use different kinds of tactics.

You can change your tactic to another if it doesn’t work and tactics seek to support strategy and if you strategy works you will achieve your goal.

Your goal is the change you seek to make in the world.

It’s the change you seek to see in the people you serve. So to achieve that goal you come up with a strategy. The strategy can be anything, to gain the customer’s trust or attention or to be seen as the best alternative or it might be to find the right people that you want to serve and many others. The act of creating that tension and building those connections and stories is how you strategize.

You don’t want to change your strategy often and if it works then it will benefit you in so many ways.

Now you come up several tactics, that might help you to support that strategy. Some might work, some you might have to scratch. You can change a tactic when you see it isn’t helping you, precisely when it isn’t helping you to support your strategy.

Let’s take an example to understand it better.

Coca-Cola has a goal, to get more and more people to consume it’s product and to know about it. So their main strategy is to imprint their image in the mind of the consumer by running enormous amount of ads. And for that, they come up with several types of ad campaigns every other day. Those ads are their tactics.

Now let’s address the elephant in the room.

To reach the right people, will Advertising work?

Well, it might or it might not. It won’t work for everyone though.

Through Advertising, you are buying the attention of the people. You can do it using various means and approaches but not every approach works.

If you find an approach that works, you would have to work on making it more precise and scale it quickly. Be clear about what you want to do and why. It’s not something you can do just because others are doing it. It should work for you.

Online advertising. Almost every other company is running ads on the internet. The Social Media channels have created a precise medium for the companies to run their ads to the ones they want, to the customers they desire to seek out to. You can measure everything at any time of the day. There’s no limit to it.

So the question arises that if Online Advertising is that powerful, why isn’t it the Focus of marketing? Shouldn’t this be it?

Well, the answer is although it’s a powerful industry, it’s the most ignored industry as well.

How many times has it been that you were scrolling and you scrolled past so many of the ads. You don’t even bat an eye to most of them. Why? Because there are so many that you don’t even try to see if it’s for you or not. The chances of you checking out an Instagram ad that is meant for you is very low.

It’s where you are buying people off so it’s not like it won’t work but it isn’t for you, at least in this moment of time.

to be continued…