Strategy First, Tactics Second: For Your Next Marketing Conversation

Your client is probably doing plenty of marketing right now, and still wondering why it isn't converting. That gap usually isn't effort. It's the buyer, and it's a distinction worth having ready before your next Revenue Development conversation.

This is the first part of a series Jen Hamilton is doing with Michael Haynes, a go-to-market specialist who works with growing B2B service and tech companies to build marketing and business development that actually connects to revenue instead of just activity. 

His first lesson is one worth bringing directly into your client engagements, whether that client has a marketing team or is the marketing team.

Your Client Doesn't Have a Marketing Problem. They Have a Buyer Problem.

Here's where Michael starts, and where most business owners, and honestly most of their marketing partners, skip ahead of. Before a single post or campaign gets planned, someone has to actually know who is deciding to hire this business, and what they're trying to solve when they do.

We have to deliver the right kinds of advice, insights, and recommendations that they're looking for. - Michael Haynes

That sounds obvious until you sit with it. Most owners market from their own head: what they think is impressive about their work, what they'd want to hear if they were the client. Michael's framework flips that. It starts with the buyer's actual priorities, not the owner's.

A useful diagnostic question for your next client conversation: if their best client described exactly what convinced them to hire the business, would the owner know the answer? 

If they're not sure, it's a sign no one ever taught them to ask, and it's exactly where you can add value before a single tactic gets touched.

The Buyer Is Doing Homework Long Before Your Client Ever Meets Them

Here's the part that changes how you should think about a client's content strategy entirely.

Our decision makers do a lot of self-education and research on their priorities and challenges, often long before they start to reach out and want a short list. - Michael Haynes

By the time a prospective client fills out a contact form, they've already been reading, watching, and comparing for weeks, sometimes months. The businesses that win aren't the ones who show up loudest when the buyer is finally ready to talk. They're the ones who showed up early, in the places that buyer was already looking. 

That timeline shift is worth making explicit for a client who's frustrated that their marketing "isn't working" despite consistent effort.

Strategy First. Tactics Second.

Posting more, running more ads, showing up on more podcasts: none of that is inherently the problem. The problem is doing all of it before answering who the business is actually trying to reach and why that person would choose them.

A lot of what gets called marketing is tactics. What's missing is the strategy, and then the tactics. - Jen Hamilton

This is exactly where Revenue Development, one of the six pillars Certified Fractional COOs use to evaluate a business's health, tends to break down in client engagements. Marketing gets treated as a to-do list instead of a strategy with its own metrics and accountability. Tactics without a strategy underneath them are just expensive guessing, and it's a pattern worth flagging the moment you see it in a client's operation.

Two Moves That Actually Build Visibility

Once a client knows their buyer, Michael's framework points to two moves that do the heavy lifting: content and what he calls micro events.

It's not just about creating the content. It's about distributing it and making it available where your people are already going for information. - Michael Haynes

That distribution piece is what most business owners miss. A client can write the best article of the year, but if it only lives on their own website, the buyer already researching somewhere else will never find it.

The other move, micro events, are smaller, focused gatherings: a roundtable, a live Q&A, a short workshop, built around the exact issues the buyer is already wrestling with. 

Neither move requires a big budget. Both require knowing the buyer well enough to know where they're actually looking, which is precisely the strategic groundwork that's often missing before tactics get built.

Bring This Into Your Next Client Engagement

This week, with one client, have them write down who their last three clients actually were, and what those clients said made them decide to hire the business. Look for the pattern together. That pattern is the starting point for every piece of content and every event built from here forward, and it's a far more useful starting point than another tactics list.

If you want to go deeper on how to bring buyer strategy into your Revenue Development conversations with clients, that's exactly the kind of framework worth building out inside the Fractional COO Collective as this series continues.