The picture on the lid: why strategy beats tactics every time
You're not bad at marketing. You're just doing a jigsaw with no picture on the box. Here's what strategy actually means, in plain English.
Jamie Clarke
13 May 2026 · 5 min read
Imagine someone hands you a thousand jigsaw pieces and no box. You’d still make progress - edges first, group the colours. But you’d waste hours forcing pieces that don’t fit, and you’d never be sure you weren’t building three different puzzles at once.
That’s how most service businesses do marketing. The pieces are tactics: a website, some posts, a bit of SEO, a newsletter someone started in January. All real pieces. No picture on the lid.
What “strategy” actually means
Agencies love making strategy sound complicated - it justifies the invoice. But strategy is just three questions answered honestly:
- Who exactly is your best customer? Not “anyone who pays”. The ones you’d clone if you could.
- What journey do they take from stranger to customer? Where do they first hear of you? What convinces them? What nearly stops them?
- What’s the one weakest point in that journey right now? Because that’s where your next pound and hour should go. Not the newest tactic. The weakest stage.
That’s it. That’s the picture on the lid. Every tactic either fits that picture or it doesn’t get done.
What changes when you have one
You stop starting things. The half-finished funnel, the abandoned TikTok, the blog with three posts from 2023 - those happen when every new idea seems as good as any other. With a strategy, most ideas get a quick, guilt-free “not now”.
Your marketing starts compounding. Random tactics add; connected ones multiply. The blog post feeds the email list, the email list fills the diary, the happy customers feed the reviews, the reviews feed the map ranking that feeds the blog traffic. That loop doesn’t happen by accident - it’s designed.
You can finally judge spend. “Should I do Facebook ads?” is unanswerable in a vacuum. Against a journey map it takes ten seconds: does it strengthen your weakest stage? No? Not now.
The £997 confession
We sell strategy - the Growth Blueprint is £997 and it’s the first paid thing we recommend to almost everyone. So yes, I would say all this.
But here’s the confession: the reason we sell strategy first isn’t margin. It’s that we got tired of watching businesses buy the wrong things - from us and from others. A website built without a strategy is a guess with nice fonts. Ads without a journey behind them are a tax on hope. We’d rather sell you the right thing second than the wrong thing first.
And if you’d rather do it yourself: the framework we use is free, right here. Score your business against the six stages, find your weakest one, fix that first. That half hour of thinking beats another month of busy tactics - and it’s the same thinking we’d charge you for.
The pieces you’ve already got are probably fine. Get the lid.
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