Strategy Before Tactics: Eric Keiles on Marketing That Works
Updated: Oct 29
Most marketing that disappoints was built in the wrong order. A website goes up, a logo gets made, an email campaign goes out, and the phone stays quiet. Eric Keiles, who has founded four companies since '97 and runs an inbound marketing firm, lives by three words. Strategy before tactics. His point is simple. Hand someone the ingredients for a chocolate cake and no recipe, and nobody knows what comes out. Give them the recipe, and even someone who can't cook will probably get a good cake. For an established owner, the recipe is a handful of questions. Who is the perfect client? What pains and problems do they have? What can you do to make those pains go away? And how can you do it in a remarkable way? Answer those first, and the website, the content and the campaigns have something to stand on.
Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 14 with Eric Keiles.
Why marketing tactics fail when they come first
You don't really need marketing to start a business. You need cash, people, maybe a facility. So marketing becomes a second thought. When owners finally get to it, they jump straight to the tactics. Build a website. Make a logo. Send some email. Then they wonder why more people don't visit the site, or why nobody fills out the form.
Eric's answer is that they skipped a few strategic questions. Who's the perfect client? What would that client want to see on the site? What would make the company remarkable against every competitor out there? These are simple questions. They get glossed over because it feels faster to throw up a website.
He doesn't limit this to marketing. A business needs a financial strategy, a people strategy and an operations strategy before anyone jumps in. Every time he works on strategy, he says, it makes everything else better.
What do customers actually want to see on your website?
Many company websites open with the company story. The square footage. The years of family ownership. Eric doesn't dismiss those. They are validation points. But they are not what a prospect came for. Customers arrive with their own pains, and they want to see that you can make those pains go away.
So flip the conversation. Stop talking about yourself and talk about them. When visitors see that you understand their problems, they connect emotionally. That simple change in posture, he says, usually brings a nice pop in results.
His clearest example is Arbill, a company that sells safety products like boots, gloves, hats and protective eyewear. When the daughter took over the business her dad started, she began asking why the company did what it did. The rallying cry that came out of it was "Everyone goes home safe tonight." The buyers were tough guys, facilities managers and plant managers. The message changed the conversation with them, and content followed it. Safety training, safety videos, safety audits, safety evaluations. Who would you rather do business with? Someone who wants to sell you something, or someone who wants to help your people get home safe each night?
Another client was a group of CPAs whose specialty is protecting people against the IRS. Positioned as tax warriors, the same accountants stood apart from every other firm, and the staff felt it too. Their homepage even carries a samurai.
How to make time for strategy when everything feels urgent
Every owner raises the same objection. Cash flow is tight, the problems are immediate, and there is no time to unplug. Eric's answer depends on what you want. If you want to be the best in your industry, you have to carve out the time. If you want a nice lifestyle business, basic execution may be enough. For owners who want to grow, he sees a direct correlation between time spent on strategy and success.
His own firm turned it into a ritual. He and his business partner hold 90 minutes every Monday morning for strategy. The calendar calls it the Sacred Strategic Meeting, and nobody steps on it or cancels it. For years they had no strategy conversation at all. Now it cascades. Their leadership team meets weekly for about an hour, quarterly for a half day, and once a year for a two day offsite. Each of the eight people on that team has direct reports, and each makes sure the strategy reaches their quarterly objectives. Everybody pulls on the rope in the same direction.
They also brought in a coach, Doug Diamond. He sets the agendas, reels them back in when they chase the next shiny object, and keeps low payoff tactical work pushed down to the team. Eric doesn't soften the lesson. Looking back, he says he was a fool not to have a coach from day one. Was the coach an investment or an expense? If you value strategy, he says, it is an investment.
Why impatience is the most common strategy mistake
Asked for the biggest mistake he sees, Eric names impatience. Inbound marketing means creating content like blog posts, guides and webinars, putting it in front of the right people, and bringing them back to your site. That takes time. He says a good inbound program takes a full year to implement, yet owners ask where their leads are after 30 days.
His own firm went from 400 website visitors a month to 14,000, by continuously adding content and getting it in front of the right people. It didn't happen overnight. Arbill went from about 25 website conversions a month to 125 after the first year, and later topped 250 a month.
What keeps people going is measurement. Seen day to day, progress is hard to notice. Seen month over month on a chart, it gives you confidence and enthusiasm. Eric's view is that very few parts of a business can't be tracked, from employee turnover to accounts receivable collection. I've seen the same thing with people in my own business. Simply measuring their output made them better at it, even when they couldn't say why.
How to put strategy before tactics in your business this week
Start small and specific.
Book a standing strategy meeting with your partner or leadership team, and treat it as one nobody can cancel.
Answer the four questions in writing. Who is your perfect client? What are their pains and problems? What can you do to make those pains go away? How can you do it in a remarkable way?
Rewrite the top of your website or pitch so it talks about the customer's pain before it talks about you.
Pick one number that shows whether the strategy is working, and look at it every month.
Decide whether outside help would be an investment or an expense for you.
Then hold the strategy a little longer than feels comfortable. The results Eric describes took months and years to build, not weeks.
Related Insights
If growth keeps stalling on tactics, an outside look at the pattern underneath is a good place to start. The Growth Pattern Diagnostic
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