Do you ever find yourself having a bunch of great ideas some of which you get to implement and others fall by the 
wayside? If you are like most business owners I would venture to guess you are an idea machine and there are just not enough hours in the day.
Over the past few years I have noticed one element of most businesses with less than 5 million in revenue have that was an overwhelming surprise and that is the lack of documented strategy or processes for marketing and sales.
Here is a quick story of how I learned the value of a defined marketing strategy.
Back in 2006 I was running networking events all over the Tampa Bay area and my colleagues and I were always having new and innovative ideas to market the events. This was around the time people were paying more attention to social networking and Facebook. Now I don’t know if you have ever hosted an event before, but if you think hosting one is a lot of work try hosting 3-5 a week! There was not enough hours in the day so what I needed to do was figure out all the mandatory things that needed to happen once an event was scheduled and create a “to do” list.
After creating the list it appeared I created another segment within it that became the marketing strategy. I did some additional research, crunched some numbers so I could set some goals and benchmarks, and then created a calendar with the process in it. This made all our events significantly easier to run and the best part was when I had these great new ideas I could plug them in and create an expected outcome rather than guessing if it was effective.
The biggest value of a strategy isn’t just documenting the processes and goal setting, but having a place to dump your ideas so you don’t lose them. Obviously some ideas you can implement immediately and other you can plug in down the road, but the great thing is they have a home and they are connected to a system that already has goals associated to them.
A goal without a plan leads to confusion and frustration.
Spend a day by yourself or preferably with your team and really dig into your goals and strategy for achieving them.
Good luck!