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B2B Market Segmentation: Expert Insights and Case Studies

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:10:19 GMT

How to Think About B2B Segmentation

In this article, we’ll go deep into the mechanics of B2B segmentation, from analyzing macro market conditions to breaking markets into meaningful structural segments, and then laddering down into precise customer definitions and ICP development. I’ll share practical examples, frameworks, and case studies to make the thinking and process as concrete as possible.

The goal is to give you a structured way to think through segmentation so you have something actionable to use across marketing, sales, and your entire business.

Real B2B segmentation is very deep work.

It requires System 2 thinking: slow, analytical, deliberate reasoning. The kind of thinking where you challenge assumptions, hone definitions, revisit boundaries, and pressure-test your logic against real data and real customer conversations.

You'll need to ask questions like:

How is this market structurally evolving over the next 3–5 years?
Where is growth concentrating? Where is margin compressing? Where is capital flowing? Segmentation that ignores structural shifts quickly becomes outdated.
How do market segments differ in size, growth rate, and profitability potential?
Do these groups operate under different cost structures, ownership models, channel strategies, or growth pressures? Segmentation should illuminate differential economic attractiveness.
How is the competitive structure different across segments?
Assess competitor presence, intensity of rivalry, and basis of competition. Who is winning and why? Are market segments dominated by one large competitor, or is share fragmented?
What distinct customer groups exhibit meaningfully different needs, motivations, and use contexts?
Customer segments should reflect real differences in problem structure and value sought.
Which customers feel the pain most acutely and most frequently?
Not just who “could” use the solution, rather who experiences the problem in a way that creates urgency. Who responds best to your positioning and value propositions?
How do buying criteria and decision processes vary across segments?
Differences in evaluation criteria, risk tolerance, and decision roles may define viable segments.
What event or trigger typically initiates the buying process? Regulatory change? New funding? Leadership turnover? Expansion? Segments behave differe ntly when their buying triggers differ.
Which segments are strategically vulnerable or underserved?
Look for misalignment between customer needs and current market offerings.
Where do the firm’s competencies and assets provide a defensible advantage?
Segmentation should connect to where the firm can compete effectively.
What must be true for this to be a high-probability, high-value customer?
Define the non-negotiables. Revenue range. Tech stack. Organizational maturity. Operational complexity. Strong segmentation excludes.
If we narrowed this segment further, would performance improve?
This is the pressure-test question. Strong segmentation often becomes more powerful as it becomes more specific.

Check out our article on the 5Cs of Marketing for help on how to conduct a situational analysis of your market >.

Good segmentation is iterative. You define a segment, test it against reality, refine it, and sharpen it again. You may start broad and realize the real opportunity sits inside a narrower structural slice. Or you may discover that two segments you thought were distinct actually share the same buying logic.

This is normal.

B2B segmentation is not a static document. It evolves as markets evolve. It improves as your understanding improves. It strengthens as you test messaging, analyze deal velocity, and study which customers actually convert, expand, and renew.

That’s why the process matters even more than the output.

Here's a broad view of the process starting at the market level and ending with a profile of key decision makers:

Define the Market: Start by defining and outlining the boundaries of your market, the macro forces shaping demand, competition, and structural shifts. This will yield sub-markets from you to choose from and prioritize.
Build Customer Segments: Create distinct customer groups within your chosen market or sub-market based on meaningful structural differences such as economics, ownership model, growth trajectory, operating model, and buying dynamics.
Choose the Target Segment: Select the customer segment you will prioritize based on strategic fit, urgency, economic power, and probability of winning.
Define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Across Key Decision Makers: Narrow the target segment into a precise definition of your best-fit companies and map the key stakeholders within them, e.g. economic buyers, technical users, influencers, and champions, so targeting, messaging, and sales strategy align around the full buying committee.

You can download the slides that accompany this article here >.

Expert Perspectives on B2B Segmentation

Seasoned marketing experts consistently stress that segmentation is fundamental to winning strategies, especially in B2B markets. Professor Malcolm McDonald calls market segmentation “one of the most fundamental concepts of marketing” and “the key to successful business performance.” He notes that it’s obvious there is no such thing as an average customer , so companies must identify distinct groups and tailor their offerings accordingly. In fact, an often-cited Harvard Business Review study by Christensen and colleagues found that around 90% of 30,000 new product launches failed due to poor market segmentation – underscoring how critical it is to get segmentation right.

McDonald argues that despite new marketing tech and data, needs-based segmentation remains the main route to commercial success. Rather than defaulting to simplistic splits (like demographics or product categories), the best practice is to segment by customer needs, behaviors, or benefits sought, especially in B2B where those needs can vary greatly even within the same industry.

Another marketing master, Philip Kotler, along with Benson Shapiro and Thomas Bonoma (early thought leaders on B2B segmentation), emphasize using multiple criteria in combination. They outline a “nested” approach: start by segmenting on broad factors like industry sector, company size, or geography (the macro-segmentation), then drill down further into each group by more specific factors – such as the customer’s operating characteristics or purchasing approach (the micro-segmentation stage).

This two-stage approach ensures B2B firms don’t stop at obvious groupings, but also consider deeper differences in needs or buying behavior. For instance, a company might first focus on the automotive industry vs. the aerospace industry (macro-level), and then within the automotive segment, distinguish between global OEM manufacturers and smaller parts suppliers, or segment by service-focused buyers vs. price-focused buyers (micro-level). The goal is to keep refining until each target segment is as clear-cut and internally consistent as possible. As Kotler’s work suggests, effective B2B segmentation yields a crystal-clear picture of the “typical” target customer in each segment . Only with this clarity can a firm craft tailored value propositions that resonate.

It’s also widely acknowledged that B2B segmentation must be actionable and tied to strategy. Renowned strategist David Aaker and others have written about focusing on segments where your brand can be relevant and differentiated. In their strategy book Playing to Win , A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin (though drawing from B2C examples) echo a similar principle: companies need to choose “where to play” – i.e. which segments to compete in – and “how to win” in those segments by leveraging unique strengths. Legendary GE CEO Jack Welch famously put this into practice: he mandated that GE should only compete in markets where they could be the No. 1 or No. 2 player, and if not, they should exit or fix that business . This dictum essentially forced GE’s divisions to zero in on segments where GE had a true right to win (where its capabilities gave it a competitive advantage). The underlying message from these leaders: segmentation is strategic. It’s not just a marketing exercise but a company-wide choice about which customers you will serve – and serve well. Firms that segment thoughtfully (by customer needs, value, or other meaningful traits) and then align their products, services, and messages to those segments tend to outperform those that chase “average” customers with one-size-fits-all offerings.

Figure: Characteristics of excellent vs. weak market segmentation strategies (adapted from Malcolm McDonald, 2017). Effective strategies involve understanding markets in depth and targeting needs-based segments with specific offers and clear differentiation for each segment. Weaker approaches center on products rather than customer needs – for example, treating the whole market the same or focusing only on product categories – which leads to poor positioning and missed opportunities.

How to Develop Criteria to Evaluate Your Market Segments

Once you move beyond surface-level groupings, a natural question emerges: how do you know if a segment is actually valid? In B2B markets, it’s easy to create segments that look elegant in a spreadsheet but collapse when you try to build strategy, allocate resources, or execute go-to-market plans. To avoid this, marketers and strategists commonly evaluate both market segments and customer segments against a consistent set of criteria. These criteria act as a quality bar, ensuring that segments are not only intellectually sound, but practically useful.

You can download all these B2B Segmentation slides, plus bonus material, here >.

At the most basic level, a segment must be homogeneous internally. This means that the customers grouped together should be similar in ways that actually matter—such as their needs, buying criteria, operating constraints, or decision-making dynamics. If customers within a segment behave very differently or value different outcomes, the segment won’t support a coherent value proposition or marketing approach. At the same time, segments must be heterogeneous relative to one another. Each segment should be meaningfully distinct from the others; otherwise, the effort of segmentation adds complexity without improving clarity. Good segmentation increases contrast between segments while reducing variation within them.

Segments also need to be measurable . While not every dimension must be perfectly quantified, there should be enough data available to estimate the size, growth, and economic potential of a segment. Without some ability to measure a segment, it becomes difficult to prioritize investments or assess whether the opportunity is large enough to matter. Closely related is the requirement that segments be substantial . A segment may be analytically interesting, but if it cannot support meaningful revenue or profit over time, it is unlikely to warrant focused attention. Most firms have minimum thresholds for impact, and segmentation should reflect that economic reality.

Another critical criterion is accessibility . A segment must be reachable through viable channels—both in terms of marketing communication and distribution. If a firm cannot efficiently identify, target, and engage a segment, then even a well-defined group becomes impractical. Accessibility forces segmentation to stay grounded in how the business actually goes to market, not just how customers look on paper.

Beyond reach, segments must be actionable and practical . This means the organization has—or can reasonably build—the capabilities required to serve the segment with a distinct marketing mix. Over-segmentation can produce theoretically precise groups that exceed the firm’s operational or resource capacity. Strong segmentation strikes a balance between insight and execution, defining segments that the organization can realistically prioritize and support.

Finally, a strong segment must be responsive . The ultimate purpose of segmentation is to enable differentiation. If a segment does not respond more favorably to a tailored offering than to a generic one, then it is not truly a distinct segment. Responsiveness is often the clearest validation of segmentation quality: when a specific message, value proposition, or solution resonates disproportionately with one group, segmentation is doing its job.

Taken together, these criteria reinforce a simple but powerful idea: segmentation is only valuable if it leads to better strategic choices and better outcomes . Segments that are homogeneous, distinct, measurable, substantial, accessible, actionable, and responsive provide a foundation for clear positioning, focused investment, and sustained competitive advantage. Without meeting these criteria, segmentation risks becoming an academic exercise rather than a driver of real business performance.

The B2B Segmentation Process (“Laddering” from Macro to Micro)

Experts often describe B2B segmentation as a laddered or layered process. You begin at a high level and progressively drill down to finer segments, like narrowing down on a map. At the top level, a company might segment by “macro” criteria – broad categories such as industry vertical, use-case/application, or region. For example, imagine a software firm that serves both manufacturing and healthcare: it may decide to segment these as separate macro-markets because the industries are so different. Once a priority macro-segment is chosen, the next “rung” is identifying sub-segments within it. This could be by company size (e.g. large enterprises vs. mid-market firms) or by specific needs/use cases. A classic illustration is given in industrial marketing texts: a tire manufacturer could first target the automotive sector (vs. say, agricultural vehicles), then within automotive focus on large carmakers separately from small aftermarket parts dealers, and even tailor offerings by purchase criteria – some clients might seek the lowest price, while others require high reliability and service . By sequentially filtering the market – from broad to niche – the B2B marketer creates increasingly homogeneous groups. The final step is choosing target segments among these that align best with the firm’s strengths and objectives. It’s at this stage that the firm decides, “Which of these segments are the most attractive and feasible for us to win?”

This laddering approach is important because B2B markets often segment along multiple dimensions simultaneously. A simple one-factor segmentation (e.g. just by industry) may be too coarse to be useful. Instead, combining dimensions yields segments that are more actionable. A well-segmented B2B market might be defined as, for instance, “Mid-sized financial services companies in North America that need cloud-based data analytics and prioritize vendors who offer strong customer support.” That description incorporates firmographic info (industry, size, geography) and behavioral needs (analytics + support) – a far more precise target than “financial services sector” in general. Such precise segmentation helps in tailoring marketing messages, sales pitches, and even product development to match the segment’s unique profile. Research by Shapiro and Bonoma on industrial markets introduced five broad categories of variables to consider: Demographics (industry, size, location), Operating Variables (technology, usage rate, etc.), Purchasing approaches (procurement process, criteria), Situational factors (urgency of order, application use), and Personal characteristics of buyers (e.g. risk attitude, loyalty) . Great B2B segmentation often uses a mix of these – starting from the top (demographic macro segments) and then nesting the more specific criteria inside. The result is a segmentation that reflects the real-world complexities of the market, rather than an oversimplified view.

Common Challenges in B2B Segmentation (and How Firms Overcome Them)

Even with a sound process, B2B segmentation comes with unique challenges. Below are some of the biggest challenges that arise repeatedly – and examples of how companies have tackled them to win in their markets:

Multiple Decision-Makers and Personas: In B2B sales, you’re rarely targeting just one person – there’s often a buying committee or multiple influencers (e.g. a technical evaluator, a financial approver, end-users, etc.). Each has different priorities, which can muddle segmentation if you only define the segment at a company level. Leading firms solve this by incorporating persona segmentation and personalized marketing. For example, GE Healthcare realized that even within a single hospital, a radiologist, a CFO, and a technician each care about different things – and a doctor in the UK vs. one in India face different contexts. Historically, GE Healthcare’s marketing gave “the same message to all of those people,” but they restructured to tailor content to each role and region. By segmenting their audience not just by account, but by role (job function) and needs, they humanized their B2B marketing and saw a surge in engagement. The lesson: Don’t treat a client organization as one monolithic audience – segment by key personas within it. This often means developing targeted messaging for, say, engineers vs. executives, or procurement managers vs. end-users, ensuring each segment hears what matters most to them.

Shifting Customer Needs & Commoditization: B2B markets can evolve – sometimes customers’ priorities change (e.g. a greater focus on cost savings) or a product that used to be a specialty becomes a commodity. If a company doesn’t adjust its segmentation, it can lose out. A classic example is Dow Corning in the early 2000s. They faced stagnation as their core product (silicone materials) was commoditizing and competitors undercut prices. A strategic review led to a fresh needs-based segmentation of their customer base . They discovered that across industries, customers fell into four distinct segments ranging from “pure innovation seekers” (who valued technical support and R&D from Dow) to “price seekers” (who just wanted basic silicone at the lowest price) . Dow Corning realized it was over-serving the price seekers with an expensive, high-touch model those customers didn’t need. The company’s bold response was to create a whole new business unit and brand (Xiameter) to serve the price-driven segment. Xiameter sold standard silicone in bulk via a no-frills online platform – stripping out custom services and salesperson visits in exchange for prices about 15% lower. Importantly, this wasn’t just a blanket discount; it was a different business model tailored to that segment’s needs (e.g. enforcing minimum order sizes and only online ordering to keep costs down) . This move let Dow Corning “embrace” commoditization on its own terms – they retained price-sensitive customers by giving them a channel optimized for price, while the main Dow Corning business continued to focus on innovation-seeking customers who valued full service. The result was a huge success and became a textbook case of B2B segmentation: by splitting the market and offering a targeted value proposition to a neglected segment, Dow Corning captured new growth and defended its turf . The key takeaway is that when customer needs shift (e.g. toward price, or any other dimension), re-segment your market and consider new approaches rather than trying to force all customers into one model.

Technological and Channel Changes: Changes in how customers research and buy can also necessitate new segmentation. With the rise of digital channels, many B2B buyers now educate themselves long before engaging a sales rep. This has pushed companies to segment by customer journey stage or behavior. GE Healthcare’s marketing transformation is again instructive: they “woke up to the fact” that customers were 70% of the way through their decision before talking to sales . To adapt, GE Healthcare segmented content by where the customer is in the journey (e.g. providing early-stage educational content targeted to potential customers before they even enter a sales funnel). They invested in marketing automation and tracking so they could nurture leads over a long cycle and deliver the right information at the right time . This approach is akin to B2C-style segmentation by behavior (something historically less common in B2B) – tracking interactions and segmenting by interest level or engagement, not just firmographics. Another angle is the shift to e-commerce in B2B: companies now segment by preferred buying channel, offering different paths for those who want self-serve online purchasing vs. those who prefer traditional account managers. Adapting to technology shifts often means creating new segments (like “digital-first customers”) and ensuring your strategy addresses them (for example, by building an e-commerce platform for a segment that values convenience). Fast-follower vs. innovator dynamics also come into play here. Companies that foresee a new segment emerging (due to technology) can get ahead – for instance, IBM saw an opportunity in the 1990s to provide integrated solutions as businesses started networking their IT systems. They reorganized around customer-centric segments (instead of product silos) to become a one-stop solution provider . Others, who are late, must segment and target defensively after a competitor has proven the segment. In either case, being attuned to how technology is changing customer behavior is vital to updating your segmentation strategy in time.

Choosing Target Segments and “Where to Play”: Another major challenge is deciding which segments to focus on – especially for large or diversified B2B companies that could chase many opportunities. Spreading too thin undermines success, but focusing on the wrong segment can be just as fatal. The solution top strategists recommend is to evaluate segments based on both attractiveness (size, growth, profit potential) and fit with your capabilities. This echoes the “right to win” concept: choose segments where your firm has unique strengths or can build a sustainable advantage. We saw this with Jack Welch’s mandate for GE to be #1 or #2. That rule effectively forced GE to exit segments where it couldn’t lead, and double down on those where it could – a brutal but effective form of segmentation at the business portfolio level . Another example is how many SaaS companies start in a niche segment they know they can dominate (often a specific industry or use-case) before expanding. They identify a beachhead segment where their product perfectly fits an urgent need – winning there gives them a foothold and credibility to later tackle adjacent segments. The general principle is prioritization: great segmentation isn’t just dividing the market, it’s also picking the best target segments and then aligning your resources to serve them better than anyone else. As Lafley and Martin put it, strategy is fundamentally about making choices – you “win” by choosing the right place to play and then executing a tailored strategy for that chosen segment. Companies that rigorously evaluate where they can be distinctive (through their technology, relationships, cost structure, etc.) and concentrate on those segments tend to outperform those who chase every possible customer. In practice, this might mean, for example, a manufacturing supplier decides to focus only on the aerospace segment (because of a technical advantage there) and not pursue the automotive segment as aggressively – even if automotive is larger – because they know aerospace customers value their unique materials expertise more. Such discipline in segmentation can be tough (it requires saying no to some sales), but it leads to far stronger positioning in the segments you do serve.

B2B Segmentation in Action: Notable Examples

Let’s look at a few illustrative examples (past and present) of B2B segmentation driving strategy shifts, to see how theory translates to real outcomes:

General Electric’s Portfolio Segmentation – Balancing Old and New Segments: As a conglomerate, GE has always had to think in terms of segmenting which industries and markets to participate in. Under Jack Welch in the 1980s and ’90s, GE applied a Darwinian segmentation rule: if a business unit couldn’t be one of the top two in its market segment, GE would consider exiting that segment . This led GE to divest or fix underperforming units and aggressively build strength in segments where it saw leadership potential. For instance, GE exited the small consumer electronics segment (where it lacked an edge) and doubled down on segments like medical imaging and jet engines, where it had technology leadership. In the 2000s and beyond, GE also segmented markets by innovation level – launching Ecomagination (focusing on eco-friendly products) and edge initiatives for emerging market segments (like developing low-cost equipment for India and China separately from high-end segments in developed markets). Although GE’s fortunes have varied, the lesson is their willingness to segment and re-segment their portfolio of businesses in response to global changes. They treated entering new industry segments (like renewable energy) or spinning off segments (like the recent separation of GE’s healthcare, energy, and aviation arms) as strategic segmentation decisions to unlock value.

IBM in the 1990s – From Product-Centric to Customer-Centric Segmentation: In the early ’90s, IBM was struggling. The company was organized around product divisions (mainframes, PCs, software, etc.), but customers were increasingly wanting integrated solutions that solved business problems, not a pile of separate hardware and software. When Lou Gerstner took over as CEO, he famously halted a plan to break IBM into smaller product-based companies. Instead, IBM embarked on a major re-segmentation and reorganization around customer types and needs. Gerstner observed that clients “wanted help putting everything together,” not dealing with a different IBM unit for each piece . So IBM shifted to market-based segments – for example, creating teams focused on the banking industry, or on small-to-medium businesses – cutting across product lines. They also introduced the concept of IBM as a service provider (the birth of IBM Global Services) to offer one-stop solutions. This was essentially IBM choosing new segmentation dimensions: by industry vertical and by customer size, and focusing on selling solutions rather than just products. The payoff was significant: IBM’s alignment with the market made it much more “easy for customers to do business with” them and helped restore growth . This example highlights how changing your segmentation approach can be transformational. IBM moved from “What can we sell?” (product segments) to “What does the customer need?” (customer segments), a hallmark of successful B2B strategy.

Honeywell – Segmentation by Industry and Needs: Honeywell, another diversified B2B giant (spanning aerospace, automation, building technologies, materials, etc.), provides an example of multi-layered segmentation in practice. At the highest level, Honeywell is segmented into strategic business groups aligned by industry (Aerospace, Building Technologies, Performance Materials, Safety & Productivity Solutions, etc.). This is a form of macro-segmentation ensuring each unit focuses on its specific market domain. Within those groups, Honeywell further segments by customer application and needs. For instance, in aerospace they segment OEM aircraft manufacturers vs. aftermarket service customers; in building technologies, they segment commercial buildings vs. residential, and even by verticals like healthcare facilities vs. data centers (since each has distinct needs for environmental controls). Honeywell’s go-to-market teams develop segment-specific value propositions – a hospital might get an integrated “smart hospital” solution pitch, while an airport gets a different bundle – even though both use “building technologies” from Honeywell. Moreover, Honeywell adapts to new segments emerging from technology shifts, such as the segment of customers interested in IoT-enabled solutions (the “connected” segment). By segmenting and offering IoT-based services (like predictive maintenance) separately from traditional product sales, Honeywell targets forward-looking customers with a tailored approach. This ability to ladder from broad industry segments down to very specific use-case segments (and create new segments when technology enables new offerings) has helped Honeywell remain competitive across very different markets. It shows that even in very old-line industries, thoughtful segmentation (paired with targeted product strategy for each segment) is key to sustaining growth.

Dow Corning’s Xiameter (2002) – A Bold Segmentation Play: We discussed this above in the challenges, but it merits emphasis as a stand-alone example. Dow Corning essentially split its market in two when it launched the Xiameter platform. This was unusual at the time – treating a set of customers as so different that they get a wholly separate channel and brand. By doing so, Dow Corning acknowledged that the “price seeker” segment was incompatible with the high-service model needed by the “innovation seeker” segment . Rather than force one approach on all, they targeted each segment on its own terms. Xiameter’s success (it captured significant volume and operated profitably at lower margins) validated the idea that one company can use multiple segmentation strategies in parallel – essentially running a multi-segment strategy with tailored offerings for each. This is a form of tiered segmentation that other B2B firms have since emulated (for example, software companies offering both a self-serve low-price product for small businesses and an enterprise version with full support). The Xiameter case also highlights an important point: effective segmentation sometimes means you have to accept trade-offs (e.g. a simpler product, fewer services for the low-cost segment) and not try to be all things to all customers. By differentiating the value propositions, Dow Corning protected its premium segment’s value while still competing hard in the commodity segment – turning what could have been a lose-lose situation into a win-win.

Modern SaaS Companies – Segmentation by Size and Behavior: In the software-as-a-service world, segmentation is often very visible through product tiers and specialized sales teams. Take CRM software leader Salesforce as an example. Salesforce segments its market by business size and complexity: it has an entire “Small Business” edition and sales unit geared toward small and mid-sized clients (with simpler, lower-cost offerings), and a separate “Enterprise” segment with a high-touch salesforce targeting Fortune 500 firms and offering advanced, customizable solutions. The needs of a 10-person company vs. a 10,000-person company differ drastically, so Salesforce’s segmentation ensures each gets the appropriate level of service and product complexity. Another SaaS example is HubSpot, which started off focusing on small businesses with inbound marketing needs. By initially segmenting out large enterprises (which were served by other software), HubSpot built a product ideally suited to the small business segment and became a leader there. Only later did they introduce an enterprise tier to move upmarket, essentially adding a new segment once they had the capacity to serve it. Stripe, the online payments company, similarly segmented early on by targeting startups and developers (neglected by big banks). That focus allowed it to win that segment, then expand to larger online retailers and even offline businesses with tailored solutions. The common thread is that successful B2B startups often begin with a very specific target segment (sometimes defined by a combination of industry, size, and a particular “job to be done”), dominate it, and then broaden to adjacent segments. This phased segmentation strategy is a way to manage risk and gain credibility step by step. It also shows how segmentation is an ongoing, dynamic exercise – as a company grows, it may re-segment its market or add new segments to continue expanding, all while maintaining distinct strategies for each.

Tesco’s Clubcard (A B2C Segmentation Example): While our focus is B2B, it’s worth noting a famous B2C example to illustrate segmentation principles. UK retailer Tesco in the 1990s launched the Clubcard loyalty program, which collected detailed data on customer purchases. Tesco used this data to perform granular segmentation of its customer base and then tailored promotions and product offerings to different segments (e.g. targeting a “young family” segment with coupons for diapers and kids’ foods, or a “upmarket foodie” segment with premium organic product offers). This data-driven segmentation is credited with helping Tesco leapfrog competitors in the UK. Tesco also segmented its store formats to serve different needs: Tesco Express convenience stores for urban, small-basket shoppers, vs. large Tesco Extra hypermarkets for one-stop family shopping, and even Tesco Homeplus for furniture/home goods in suburban markets . By aligning store formats and product mix to distinct segments and shopping occasions, Tesco maximized its reach. The Clubcard example shows how understanding sub-groups of customers (through data) can inform everything from marketing to operations. In a B2B sense, the parallel would be using detailed customer research to identify segments by behavior or value, and then adapting your service model for each (much like how GE Healthcare used marketing automation data to segment and personalize outreach, or how Dow Corning used purchasing behavior to segment price-sensitive vs. service-sensitive clients). The core idea is the same: know your segments deeply, then act on that knowledge to tailor the experience.

An in Depth Look: The B2B CRM Market and Customer Segmentation

To make these concepts concrete, the examples below walk through segmentation in two steps using the CRM category. First, we look at the CRM market itself , breaking it into distinct market segments (such as Sales CRM, Marketing Automation, and Revenue Operations) and evaluating each based on size, growth, competitive intensity, and strategic fit. This helps answer the question, “Where should we play?”

Next, we zoom in on one of those market segments (Sales Team Focused CRMs) and apply a second table to evaluate customer segments within that market, comparing different need states, buying dynamics, right-to-win, and competitive pressure. Together, these tables illustrate how strong B2B segmentation moves from market-level structure to customer-level focus, and how each layer informs smarter prioritization, positioning, and go-to-market decisions.

Choosing a Customer Target & Creating a Profile

Once a CRM customer segment is selected as the main target, the work doesn’t stop at naming the segment—it deepens into understanding the people inside it . This target customer profile is an example of what that looks like in practice for a B2B SaaS leader evaluating a CRM . After identifying the segment (for example, mid-sized B2B SaaS companies with complex revenue motions), the profile translates that abstract segment into a real decision-maker with concrete goals, pressures, motivations, and constraints. By fleshing out objectives, pain points, buying influences, and behavioral triggers, teams can move from “who we’re targeting” to “how this customer actually thinks and buys.” Profiles like this are how segmentation becomes actionable: they inform positioning, clarify value propositions, guide CRM feature prioritization, shape sales conversations, and align marketing, sales, and product teams around a shared understanding of the customer. In short, once a target segment is chosen, profiles like this turn strategy into execution.

Why B2B Segmentation Matters More Than Ever

B2B segmentation is not a one-time task but a continuous strategic discipline. Customer needs evolve, new segments emerge (for example, the rise of the “as-a-service” segment in industries like manufacturing, where customers prefer outcomes or subscriptions over buying equipment outright), and competitive dynamics shift. Companies that have a solid segmentation framework and thinking approach can sense these changes earlier by keeping a close eye on each segment’s trends.

Moreover, with the proliferation of data and analytics, B2B firms have more tools to conduct fine-grained segmentation – from predictive lead scoring (segmenting by likelihood to buy) to customer success analytics (segmenting by product usage patterns to drive upsell and retention). The experts universally agree that focusing on the right segments is a force-multiplier for business performance. It allows for more efficient marketing (you’re not casting a wide net and hoping), more effective sales (sales teams can specialize by segment and really become experts in their customers’ context), and even guides innovation (knowing unmet needs in a segment can spark new product ideas). As one Nielsen study noted, companies that outgrow their competitors tend to derive a higher portion of revenue from carefully personalized offerings – essentially, from segmented strategies – than slower growers.

In summary, B2B segmentation is different from B2C in its complexity, but the core goal is the same: to identify groups of customers who have meaningful common needs or traits, so that you can serve them better than a more generalized approach ever could. The best B2B practitioners treat segmentation as the cornerstone of their strategy – informing everything from product development to channel strategy. Thought leaders from Kotler to McDonald to Lafley have all, in their own way, preached the mantra of “divide and conquer” in markets. When done well, segmentation clarifies where to focus and how to win, which is incredibly liberating for a business. Instead of trying to be “everything to everyone,” the company can double down on being the best for someone – namely, the customers in its chosen segments. And as the examples of IBM, GE, Dow Corning, and others illustrate, that focus can lead to remarkable shifts in fortune, turning struggling businesses into market leaders. Whether it’s an established industrial giant reorganizing around customer segments, or a startup carving out a niche, segmentation is often the decisive factor between companies that merely survive and those that thrive.

You can download all the B2B Segmentation slides from this article, plus bonus material, here >.

Adam Fischer is a marketer with 10+ years of experience in brand management and digital marketing. He’s challenged conventional assumptions and taken bold moves to drive growth for small businesses like Dogeared Jewelry to multi-billion-dollar companies like CVS Health and Nature Made Vitamins. He leverages his B.S. in Philosophy from Northeastern University to ask questions that get to the heart of business issues, while his MBA in Marketing from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU translates management philosophy into real strategic growth.

B2B vs B2C Segmentation – Key Differences

Segmenting business markets (B2B) is more complex and nuanced than segmenting consumer markets (B2C). Harvard research observes that industrial (B2B) market segmentation is especially complicated because the same product can have multiple applications, different customers have widely varying needs, and it’s tricky to discern which differences truly matter for strategy. Unlike B2C companies that often segment by broad demographics or lifestyles, B2B firms focus on firmographics and add in role-based attributes. For example, B2B segmentation looks at factors like a target company’s industry, size, location, and technology, as well as the job title and function of key buyers.

In practice, this means a B2B marketer might tailor one approach for CFOs in large manufacturing firms and a different approach for engineers in mid-size tech companies – even if both are buying the same type of product. B2C segmentation, by contrast, might group individual consumers by age bracket, lifestyle, or behavior patterns.

Another key difference is the buying process: B2B purchases typically involve multiple decision-makers (buying committees), longer sales cycles, and informational buying criteria, whereas B2C decisions are often solo and can be driven by personal preference or emotion. Successful B2B segmentation must account for this complexity, ensuring that marketing and sales messages address the distinct priorities of, say, a technical user and an economic buyer. As one industry source puts it, B2B audiences base decisions more on business need and impact (e.g. saving time, money, boosting ROI), whereas B

LinkedIn Ads Targeting: How B2B Teams Reach the Right Buyers

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 05:49:31 GMT

Why LinkedIn targeting feels confusing (and why it matters)

It’s time to launch a new LinkedIn ad campaign! You feel totally confident about LinkedIn ads targeting, right?

Erm…maybe not.

If you’re not feeling confident about LinkedIn Ads targeting, you’re not alone.

There are a bunch of settings, filters, targeting options, and measures of success to manage. It can be overwhelming to determine where to begin and what the right approach is for your business.

The real risk, spending money on the wrong audience

One of the biggest fears B2B marketers have about LinkedIn Ads is spending money on the wrong audience. It’s true that spending money on LinkedIn ads is a significant investment, and if done wrong you can bleed budget fast. In fact, at $8-$16 per click or more, LinkedIN ads can be 3X to 10X more expensive than Meta. You’re paying for targeting you can’t get anywhere else, but you need to master it to get high quality leads without burning your budget with the wrong audience.

Luckily, for as much bad targeting on LinkedIn Ads that wastes precious funds, there is great targeting that yields a significant return on investment.

What good targeting on LinkedIn looks like

In B2B marketing, “good targeting” on LinkedIn Ads means that you know who your target audience is, what message will resonate with them, and how to reach them.

Let’s assume that you know these first two things: who your target audience is and what message will resonate with them. But maybe you’re struggling with how to reach them. We’re here to help you figure that last part out by providing you with our proven tips and techniques for navigating LinkedIn Ads targeting.

The LinkedIn targeting options you should understand first

To effectively reach your target audience on LinkedIn, you first need to understand the targeting options available to you. At a high level, LinkedIn Ads targeting is built on three core components:

Targeting categories
Inclusions
Exclusions

LinkedIn offers a wide range of targeting categories you can use to define your audience, such as company name, company size, job function, seniority, and more. These categories allow you to filter and select the characteristics that align with your Ideal Customer Profile .

However, the most important principle to understand is this:

LinkedIn Ads targeting isn’t just about choosing who should see your ads. It’s also about actively preventing the wrong people from seeing them.

For every attribute you include, you should be asking yourself who needs to be excluded. Exclusions help tighten your audience by removing roles, companies, or attributes that don’t align with your goals, ensuring your ads aren’t served to irrelevant or unqualified users. This two-step process is what turns basic targeting into an effective strategy.

We’ll break down each targeting category in detail, and you’ll see this “inclusion-plus-exclusion” approach reinforced throughout. Once you understand how these pieces work together, you’ll be far better equipped to use LinkedIn’s targeting options to drive meaningful, efficient results.

For a full view of all of LinkedIn’s targeting options, check out this download here >.

Locations and language, common “gotchas”

LinkedIn requires you to target your audience by location . You can target by continent, county, state/region, county, and city. There are options to target by permanent location (ideal for reaching residents in a specific location), recent location (useful for advertising related to events), or a combination of both. In most cases, you’re going to want to filter by permanent location.

You can also exclude specific locations within your LinkedIn ads campaign to avoid showing ads to people for whom your service isn’t relevant. Let’s say for the sake of this blog you are trying to reach marketing agency owners in the United States. You’ll want to filter for “United States” and exclude all other countries.

LinkedIn also requires you to target your audience by language , of which there are 35 to choose from. However, there is a common “gotcha” in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager when it comes to selecting a language that you should be aware of: for Sponsored Content, selecting “English” does not mean you are filtering your audience by language. It means your ads can reach all members in your targeted locations , regardless of the language set on their LinkedIn profiles.

Language only becomes a true audience filter when you select a non-English language, which restricts ad delivery to members whose profile language matches that selection. The exception is Sponsored Messaging, where language selection always acts as a filter, English included.

When in doubt, we recommend selecting the language that your ad is written in.

Company industry and company size

Let’s return to our example of trying to reach marketing agency owners in the United States.

In this case, you would filter by company industry and include “Marketing Services” and “Advertising Services.” Then, you would exclude every other industry that LinkedIn provides as a category. This is time consuming, but well worth it because it will narrow your audience and ensure that LinkedIn doesn’t present your ads to people in irrelevant industries.

You’d want to take the same approach to filter for the company sizes you want. When it comes to marketing agencies, 50 employees or less is typical, so you would filter to include company sizes of 2-10 and 11-50. You would then exclude all other company size options.

No matter the industry or company size you’re targeting, starting with clear inclusions and then deliberately excluding the rest is how you prevent wasted spend and maintain targeting precision.

Job function and seniority vs. job title

For most B2B marketing teams, “job function” combined with “seniority” should be the default approach. This pairing is one of the most effective ways to reach the right people without unnecessarily narrowing your audience or missing qualified prospects due to title variation. Here’s why it works so well.

Job titles on LinkedIn are far from standardized. The same role can be represented by dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of different titles. For example, someone leading HR might be called Head of HR, VP of People, Chief People Officer, or something entirely custom. If you rely on job titles alone, you’re forced to anticipate and include every possible variation, which is time-consuming and still leaves room for error.

The job function option solves this problem. LinkedIn groups users into broader functional buckets, such as Human Resources, Marketing, Sales, Business Development, or Entrepreneurship, regardless of how their title is written. So, when you layer job function with seniority (i.e., Manager, Director, VP, CXO, Owner, Partner), you can efficiently reach everyone who fits that role and level of influence.

This approach is especially effective for targeting founders, owners, and executives, like in our example of targeting marketing agency owners in the United States. Many of these individuals don’t fit neatly into traditional job functions. Instead, they often fall under Business Development or Entrepreneurship, with seniority levels such as Owner, Partner, or CXO. Filtering by function and seniority captures these audiences far more reliably than trying to guess the “right” title.

It’s also important for you to understand a key LinkedIn Ads limitation: you cannot target job function, seniority, and job title at the same time.

You must choose one of the following:

Job function and seniority

Job title alone

In almost all cases, job function plus seniority is the better choice, but there are exceptions. For example, we recommend targeting by job title in situations where there are few, if any, alternative ways to describe the role. For example, a title like “Chief Transformation Officer” or a newly emerging role may not yet be consistently categorized under a function. In those cases, job title targeting can be the most precise option.

There is one final and critical point we want to make here:

Even when you’re targeting for job function and seniority, you can still EXCLUDE job titles.

This is where many advertisers miss an opportunity. Excluding irrelevant or unwanted titles (such as junior roles) helps tighten your audience without sacrificing reach. Think of exclusions as guardrails that protect your budget while allowing your inclusion targeting to remain broad enough to perform.

In short:

Use job function and seniority as your default targeting strategy
Use job titles sparingly, and only when the role is truly niche or new
Always apply job title exclusions to filter out noise

This approach gives you the best balance of scale, precision, and efficiency within LinkedIn Ads targeting.

Skills, interests, and groups

It’s also important for you to understand a key LinkedIn Ads limitation: you cannot target job function, seniority, and job title at the same time.

You must choose one of the following:

Job function and seniority

Job title alone

There is one final and critical point we want to make here:

Even when you’re targeting for job function and seniority, you can still EXCLUDE job titles.

In short:

Use job function and seniority as your default targeting strategy
Use job titles sparingly, and only when the role is truly niche or new
Always apply job title exclusions to filter out noise

This approach gives you the best balance of scale, precision, and efficiency within LinkedIn Ads targeting.

Advanced Linkedin Ads Targeting: Testing Audience Combos

Although we typically see job function + seniority end up as the main winner for audience targeting, you should test some additional setups if you have the budget and time.

At a high level, LinkedIn audience targeting falls into one of these four combos:

Job Titles
Job Seniority + Job Function
Job Seniority + Job Function + Skills
Any of the above + Company Growth Rate

Understanding when, and when not , to use each combo is critical to reaching the right buyers without wasting budget.

The company growth rate feature is an interesting one. This allows you to prioritize companies that are actively scaling, hiring, or investing, often signaling higher buying intent. This targeting allows you to craft messaging to your audience that specifically addresses their problems and needs as a high growth organization.

Matched Audiences, the most underrated targeting tool

Matched Audiences are one of the greatest tools available for B2B LinkedIn ads targeting, particularly for ABM, retargeting, and expansion campaigns.

Matched Audiences, the most underrated targeting tool

LinkedIn’s Account List Targeting allows you to upload a CSV of target company names and match them against LinkedIn’s database of company pages. This essentially lets you run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns directly within LinkedIn, reaching decision-makers at specific organizations you care about rather than broad demographic segments.

Once your list is uploaded and matched (which can take up to 48 hours), you can add it to your campaign like any other audience filter. Think of this approach as “ABM light.” You get targeted exposure at named accounts without needing to use a third-party ABM tool.

Contact list uploads

LinkedIn allows you to upload a contact list to create a custom audience, but in most cases we recommend taking an “ABM light” approach by uploading a company list instead. Company lists tend to be more durable and up to date, whereas contact-level data can quickly become stale as people change roles, companies, or email addresses. That said, there are scenarios where using a contact list does make sense.

When you upload a contact list, LinkedIn attempts to match the email addresses in your file to existing Member Profiles. This allows you to serve ads directly to people you already have a relationship with, such as prospects, customers, or partners, making this option useful for retargeting or expansion campaigns.

As with Account List Targeting, LinkedIn requires contact lists to be uploaded as a CSV file using its prescribed template. Providing as much accurate information as possible in that file improves match rates and audience quality (more complete data leads to a more refined and usable audience)

Retargeting audiences

Retargeting is where LinkedIn Ads stop being a high cost awareness channel and start behaving like a performance engine. Unlike cold targeting, retargeting allows you to re-engage people who have already shown some level of interest: by visiting your website, engaging with an ad, opening a document, or submitting a Lead Gen Form. Because these audiences are warmer and more familiar with your brand, campaigns tend to see higher engagement rates, better lead quality, and more efficient cost per result.

LinkedIn lets you use the Insight Tag on your website to track visitors and build retargeting segments based on the pages they visit. Once someone visits your site and is matched via the Insight Tag, you can retarget them on LinkedIn with ads that reflect their behavior. This is critical for continuing to nurture audiences who have already shown interest in your brand.

If you want to see a full view of how Strategy Kiln does retargeting on LinkedIn, you’ll find our exact process in this Miro visualization >.

Predictive audiences and when to test them

You may have heard of and even used LinkedIn’s “ Lookalike audience ” feature. LinkedIn retired that feature in February of 2024, replacing it with Predictive audiences .

Predictive Audiences are a type of Matched Audience that use a combination of AI and first-party data to predict which LinkedIn members are likely to behave similarly to your high-value source audiences. They take about 48 hours to generate.

Rather than simply matching similar profiles based on past traits, predictive audiences analyze patterns from data sources such as Lead Gen Forms, uploaded contact or company lists, conversions captured by the Insight Tag, or retargeting audiences. LinkedIn then builds a dynamic custom audience that continuously updates and scales your reach to members likely to perform desired actions.

When to test Predictive Audiences:

After you’ve built a strong seed list, because predictive audiences require at least 300 members in your source data to be created.
When you want to scale beyond your matched contacts without manually expanding interest or demographic filters.
When campaign performance needs improvement in conversion or lead quality; predictive models can help focus on high-intent prospects.
As an alternative to Lookalike audiences. If you previously relied on lookalikes for prospecting, predictive audiences are now LinkedIn’s recommended way to grow your target reach.

By combining Predictive Audiences with strong core targeting and Matched Audiences, you can maintain precision while still exploring new, relevant prospects who are likely to convert.

Common targeting mistakes that waste budget

One of the biggest complaints that we hear from our clients before they start working with us is that the time, effort, and most importantly, money they have spent on LinkedIn ads targeting has been a waste. It pains us to hear this because we know that it may very well be true if they have been making some common targeting mistakes that bleed an advertising budget dry.

Finding the right balance: not too small, not too broad

When advertisers create overly narrow audiences, it’s often driven by the belief that concentrating spend on a tiny, hyper-specific group will produce better results. Unfortunately, that approach can backfire. If your audience is too small, LinkedIn doesn’t have enough people to deliver ads efficiently, which can limit reach, inflate costs, and ultimately restrict lead volume. We call this phenomenon “oversegmentation.”

On the flip side, audiences that are too broad introduce a different set of problems. Casting too wide a net means your ads are more likely to reach people who aren’t a good fit for your offer. That leads to wasted budget, lower engagement, and muddy performance data that makes optimization harder over time.

For most of our clients, the “sweet spot” for target audience size is 60,000 or less. The goal is balance: you want an audience that’s focused enough to align with your Ideal Customer Profile, but large enough to allow LinkedIn’s delivery system to work effectively.

This is where exclusions become just as important, if not more important, than inclusions.

Exclusions

Yes, we are going over this again – it is that important!

You should select the job functions, seniority levels, and other attributes you want to target. But it is equally important to exclude people you don’t want to reach. People like sales reps, interns, and students often slip into campaigns even when they’re not part of your buying audience. Left unchecked, they can quietly drain your budget.

Exclusions act as “hard” filters in LinkedIn Ads. While inclusion targeting can still allow some irrelevant users through, exclusions actively prevent your ads from showing to people who you know for sure don’t meet your criteria. This improves efficiency, and ensures your message reaches the most qualified prospects, leading to higher conversion rates and stronger ROI.

In short, effective targeting isn’t just about who you let in. It’s about who you intentionally keep out.

Layering too many filters

Most often, layering too many filters in your LinkedIn Ads campaign will lead to an audience that is too small. You don’t want to get so specific in your targeting that you miss the point of why you are advertising – to create demand, learn what resonates, and allow LinkedIn’s delivery system enough room to find the right people to present your ads to.

Over-constraining your audience may feel like precision at work, but it often limits performance, increases costs, and prevents campaigns from scaling.

Optimizing too early

Many people also make the mistake of optimizing their campaigns too early, making changes to audience parameters after just a few days’ worth of results. The more nurturing of your audience you do, the better; decision-making takes time in B2B marketing.

In our eBook, Raising All Ships with LinkedIn Ads , we provide a close look at exactly how long you should be running a LinkedIn Ads campaign to build trust with your audience before you start making changes to increase intent, demand, and ultimately, engagement. The eBook explains why nurturing takes so long, and why it is ultimately worth it.

Quick checklist for LinkedIn Ads targeting

We’ve laid just about all our secrets bare here for you to build and refine a LinkedIn ads targeting strategy that will yield results for your business, but we have one more thing to give you: the Strategy Kiln Audience Segmentation Form.

This form is what we send to our clients before we start building a LinkedIn Ads targeting campaign for them. It asks for details about their target audience and acts as a quick checklist to make sure they know exactly who they are looking for before we get to work. We invite you to use it too!

Bringing it all together: a smarter approach to LinkedIn Ads targeting

LinkedIn Ads targeting doesn’t have to be overwhelming, but it does require intention. The most effective B2B campaigns are built by clearly defining who you want to reach, deliberately excluding who you don’t, and resisting the urge to overcomplicate the process.

Whether you’re targeting by company attributes, job function and seniority, or leveraging Matched Audiences, the goal is always the same: create enough focus for relevance while leaving enough room for LinkedIn’s delivery system to work. When you approach targeting as a structured, repeatable process, you give your campaigns the best possible chance to perform.

Get the fundamentals right, stay disciplined with exclusions, and allow time for your audience to nurture. That’s how LinkedIn Ads targeting turns from a budget drain into a reliable B2B growth channel.

If you want a second set of eyes

If you want help pressure-testing your LinkedIn Ads targeting before you start spending money on your campaign, reach out to us . If you are on the right track, we’ll tell you so, and cheer you on as you kick off your campaign. If you need some extra help, we’d be happy to provide it.

Mastering LinkedIn Hooks: An In Depth Look at How B2B Thought Leaders Stop the Scroll

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:52:52 GMT

Hooks are one of those words that get used constantly, but rarely unpacked. Everyone agrees the opening matters, yet most conversations stop at what to write instead of digging into why certain hooks work, what psychology they’re tapping into, and how to create hooks that are high-value, credible, and actually earned. I wanted to go deeper than tactics alone. This piece brings together the fundamentals from classic copywriters like Ogilvy, Caples, and Sugarman with a modern, in-the-feed playbook drawn from creators I personally follow, like Jasmin Alić, alongside behavioral psychology and Jonah Berger’s STEPPS framework. It’s designed to cover how hooks work across text posts, static images, carousels, and video so you don’t just write better openings, but understand how to consistently earn attention and deliver on it across multiple mediums.

What Is a “Hook” and Why Does It Matter?

In copywriting, a hook is the attention-grabbing opening that stops your audience in their tracks and compels them to keep reading or watching. It’s often compared to a headline – in fact, ad legend David Ogilvy said, “When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” In other words, the success of your entire message can depend on the first few words.

On LinkedIn, this is literally true: only ~3 lines (about 200–220 characters) of a post are shown “above the fold” before a reader must click “See more” . If your opening doesn’t earn that click, the rest of your content might as well be invisible. A strong hook is your competitive advantage in a crowded feed.

Hooks “get you in the room,” to borrow a phrase from LinkedIn creator Jasmin Alić. They pique interest and draw the reader in. But as Jasmin notes, a good hook is just the beginning – you must also “slam the door” behind the reader so they stay till the end. In practical terms, that means delivering on the hook’s promise and maintaining energy throughout your post (more on that later). First, let’s see how master copywriters have defined and used hooks to grab attention.

Classic Hook - Writing Wisdom from the Copywriting Masters

Long before LinkedIn and social media, copywriters in advertising were obsessed with the art of the hook, though they often spoke in terms of headlines or opening lines. Their timeless principles are highly relevant for crafting LinkedIn hooks:

David Ogilvy – Open with Fire: Ogilvy famously advised, “When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with fire.” ��
The idea is to start with drama and immediacy – something visceral that demands attention . In B2B terms, this might mean leading with a high-stakes problem or bold statement your target audience cares about. Ogilvy also emphasized clarity and simplicity in headlines, knowing you have mere seconds to hook the reader.

John Caples – The Headline Is Everything: Caples, author of Tested Advertising Methods , showed through countless tests that an ad’s headline (i.e. its hook) is often the single determinant of success.
“The success of an entire advertising campaign may stand or fall on what is said in the headlines,” writes Caples. He taught that a great hook should make an offer clear and appeal to the reader’s self-interest immediately. In practice, this means your LinkedIn hook should quickly answer “What’s in it for the reader?” or promise a benefit that matters to them.

Joseph Sugarman – The First Sentence = The First Step Down a Slide: Direct marketing legend Joe Sugarman famously said the sole purpose of the first sentence is to get the reader to read the second sentence .
He taught copywriters to use a short, intriguing opening line that “opens a curiosity loop” . For example, Sugarman might start with a teaser like “Picture this.” or “This is the truth.” – something easy to read that creates an open question in the reader’s mind . Each sentence should flow naturally into the next, almost “slippery” in momentum. This cascading interest is exactly what a LinkedIn hook should spark: a quick, curious read that makes clicking “See more” irresistible.

Classic Formulas (AIDA and More): Traditional copywriting frameworks all begin with grabbing Attention. The AIDA model (Attention–Interest–Desire–Action) puts Attention first for a reason – without it, nothing else lands.
Copywriters often used tactics like surprising facts, questions, or bold claims to get attention. Claude Hopkins and Eugene Schwartz wrote about identifying an exciting “ Big Idea ” or drama inherent in the product/problem to lead with. Even Claude Hopkins in the early 1900s knew an ad’s opening must arrest the reader’s gaze. In LinkedIn terms, this could be a startling industry statistic, a provocative question to your niche, or a contrarian statement that challenges common wisdom. The hook is where you flag down your target reader and say, “Hey, this is about you – and it’s important.”

“Don’t Be Boring” – Say Less to Hook More: The 18th-century philosopher Voltaire quipped, “The secret to being boring is to say everything.” The best copywriters take this to heart.
A hook is about teasing, not telling everything upfront . If you give away your entire message in the first sentence, the reader has no reason to continue. Instead, great hooks withhold just enough information to stir curiosity or tension. They promise value without fully delivering it in the preview. As modern copywriter Chip Heath puts it, “Shift from ‘What information do I need to convey?’ to ‘What questions do I want my audience to ask?’” . A hook should plant a question that the reader needs answered – essentially making them lean in and continue reading for the payoff.

In summary, the old masters teach us that a hook must be clear, impactful, and centered on the reader. It should hit a pressure point (a pain, desire, or curiosity) in as few words as possible. Now, let’s explore the psychology behind why certain hooks work, and how we can apply those principles on LinkedIn.

The Psychology Behind Effective Hooks (Curiosity, Emotion, and Value)

Grabbing attention is not just an art; it’s science. Human brains are wired to notice certain triggers and to seek resolution to curiosity. Great hooks exploit these psychological tendencies:

Curiosity and Open Loops: A well-crafted hook often creates a knowledge gap in the reader’s mind – they realize there’s something they don’t know yet and they want to find out . This is sometimes called the curiosity gap . When your LinkedIn post starts by alluding to an intriguing story or a promise ( “I discovered a strategy that doubled our leads – and it’s not what you think…” ), it sets up a question that the reader feels compelled to answer by reading on. Psychologically, people have a hard time leaving questions unresolved – this is related to the Zeigarnik effect (we remember uncompleted tasks). By posing a question (explicitly or implicitly), your hook leverages the reader’s innate desire for closure. Your first lines should make readers ask themselves, “What happened? How so? Tell me more!” . For example, starting a post with “Yesterday, my product demo completely failed – and it was the best thing that happened to our team.” immediately raises questions that beg for an explanation.
Referencing the Zeigarnik effect (uncompleted tasks bug us), this psychological trigger has widespread application. While working on paid media at a tech company called IntelyCare, I developed a retargeting campaign to show nurses who applied with IntelyCare exactly where they were in the process. By providing a visual of what they had accomplished in the application, what the gaps and remaining tasks were, and really punching up how this was unfinished and would only take a few minutes to get done, we were able to get applicants to remember the uncompleted task and take action to get the application completed.

Emotional Arousal: Emotions are attention magnets. Jonah Berger, in his bestselling book Contagious: Why Things Catch On , notes that “When we care, we share.” Content that evokes high-arousal emotions (awe, anger, fear, excitement, humor) tends to get more attention and is more likely to go viral. A hook that packs an emotional punch will stand out in a feed full of bland updates. This doesn’t mean every hook must be dramatic or shocking, but it should make the reader feel something : surprise, concern, hope, urgency, etc.
On LinkedIn, a B2B hook might tap into professional emotions – pride, frustration, ambition, FOMO – for instance: “Quarter after quarter, 60% of salespeople miss quota. Here’s why it’s not their fault:” (sparking frustration or intrigue). Emotional hooks work not by manipulation, but by highlighting stakes that matter to your audience. If you trigger that “hey, that hits home!” feeling, you’ve got their attention.

Relevance and Self-Interest: The brain is finely tuned to filter out irrelevant information. We pay attention to things that speak to our needs and interests (often unconsciously asking, “What’s in it for me?”). A powerful hook signals who the content is for and why they should care .
One technique is to call out your audience directly . For example: “CTOs at SaaS startups, stop ignoring this cybersecurity gap…” or “Dear marketers: most of you are tracking the wrong metric.” By addressing the reader (or their role/industry) in the hook, you tap into their self-interest and signal that this content is tailored to them. I want to really stress this point; if you have high value solutions for a specific customer problem, you should call out who that specific customer is. This is a great opportunity to take a core concept and write several posts on LinkedIn for several different audiences, but personalizing your hooks and content for each unique customer.
Another way to be instantly relevant is to mention a timely trigger – something top-of-mind for your audience. Jonah Berger’s framework notes that triggers (contextual cues) keep ideas sticky. In his book, Contagious, Jonah mentions how although no one openly admits to liking the song Friday by Rebecca black from 2011, it was a massive hit. Jonah relates the song’s success to how it was disproportionately played on Fridays and was top of mind for that day.
For a B2B audience, referencing a current industry trend or news item in your opener can hook those who are already thinking about that topic.

Novelty and Surprise: Our brains are hardwired to notice changes or anomalies – an evolutionary trait for detecting threats or opportunities. Hooks that defy expectations or present a contrarian idea often perform well. A LinkedIn hook that starts with “Everything you know about X is wrong.” or “We fired our top salesperson – on purpose.” contradicts assumptions and forces the reader to reconcile the surprise by reading on. Novelty also creates social currency – if something is surprising and insightful, people feel eager to share it to appear “in the know” . That’s why posts with “shocking but true” insights (backed by data or stories) tend to get high engagement. Just ensure the surprise is relevant and not mere clickbait – it should tie into a real insight of value.

Specificity and Credibility: Specific details (numbers, names, data) in a hook can add credibility and intrigue. For example, “In 2025, I interviewed 100 CFOs about remote work – here’s what shocked me:” has multiple specific elements: a year, a quantity, a target persona, and a hint at a surprising finding. Specifics make a hook more concrete and believable (it’s not just fluff), and they pique curiosity because they promise an actual insight or outcome. In B2B, citing a statistic or result in your opener can be very effective: “Our startup cut customer churn from 8% to 2% in six months. The first thing we fixed was…” – a precise result that gets a B2B reader’s attention. Research shows that using numbers, timeframes, or naming a recognizable entity can boost hook performance . Just remember to hide the “how” – reveal the impressive result or claim, but save the explanation for after the click (e.g. end the hook on a colon or question to imply there’s more to come ).

The STEPPS Framework: Why We Share (and How It Informs Hooks)

Marketing professor Jonah Berger distilled six key factors that make ideas and content contagious – summarized by the acronym STEPPS . While STEPPS applies to overall content virality, understanding these principles can help you create hooks that not only grab attention but also encourage readers to engage and share. Here’s a quick look at each principle and how a LinkedIn hook might leverage it:

Social Currency: We share things that make us look good or smart. A hook can tap into this by offering insider knowledge or a fresh perspective that readers will want to repeat. Example: “Hiring secret: One question Google’s HR chief always asks (and why it works):” – a hook like this makes the reader feel they’re getting privileged info (so clicking and sharing gives them social points).

Triggers: This is about being top-of-mind. A hook referencing a ubiquitous trigger in your audience’s environment can latch onto something they frequently think about . For instance, “Every Monday morning, sales teams make this mistake…” uses the Monday trigger for professionals. The idea is to connect your content to a cue that routinely sparks recall. If your hook ties into a common scenario or daily ritual, it’s immediately relatable and attention-grabbing.

Emotion: As mentioned, content that evokes emotion gets shared. Hooks that promise an emotional payoff – whether it’s inspiration ( “This founder’s story brought our whole team to tears:” ), excitement ( “The most thrilling B2B campaign we tried this year:” ), or even anger ( “Why 70% of software buyers feel cheated – and how we can fix it:” ) – will draw people in . High-arousal emotions in a hook act as a catalyst: if readers feel , they’re more likely to act (click, comment, share).

Public: Berger means that people imitate what they see others doing – “built to show, built to grow” . For hooks, this can translate to bandwagon or popularity cues. E.g., “How Company X’s post got 1 million views – lessons learned:” or “The framework everyone in DevOps is talking about:” . By hinting that others are already interested or benefiting, you trigger a bit of FOMO – if everyone’s looking at it, I should too. Just be truthful; false hype can backfire.

Practical Value: People share useful content. A hook that clearly promises practical value will reel in a time-strapped professional audience . This is where list and how-to post hooks shine: “5 proven steps to reduce cloud server costs by 30%.” The reader’s brain immediately thinks “This could help me.” B2B audiences love actionable insights, so emphasize concrete value in the hook (and deliver on it in the content). Words like “tips”, “strategies”, “framework”, “guide”, or explicit outcomes (e.g. “increase ROI”, “save 10 hours a week”) in your opener signal that reading further will be worth their time.

Stories: Humans are wired for stories – we pay attention to narratives because we want to know how they end . A story-based hook can be extremely effective: it sets up a scenario that compels completion. For instance, “She was a first-time CEO who almost lost everything in year one…” or “I walked into my big presentation and nothing went as planned:” . These openings drop the reader into the middle of a story, creating suspense. As Berger notes, “Stories are vessels” – they carry your ideas along for the ride . On LinkedIn, sharing a quick narrative in the hook (especially a personal or case-study anecdote) can humanize your content and captivate readers. Just be sure the story is relevant to the insight you’re delivering, so it’s not just anecdote for anecdote’s sake.

In applying STEPPS to hooks, you don’t need all six in one hook (that would be overkill). But weaving one or two of these elements into your LinkedIn post openers can greatly increase their stopping power and their shareability. For example, a hook might combine Practical Value + Emotion: “Feeling burned out by endless Zoom calls? Here are 3 science-backed ways a VP of Engineering reclaimed 10 hours a week (and got her team happier)…” – this promises useful tips (practical) and addresses an emotional pain (burnout), likely hitting a nerve with many B2B readers.

How to Use Hooks on LinkedIn: Strategies for Different Content Types

LinkedIn content comes in various formats – text posts, image posts, videos, carousels (documents), even newsletters and articles. While the core principles of a good hook remain the same, you should tailor your approach based on the medium. Below, we break down hook strategies by format, all within a B2B context:

Hooks in Text Posts (Feed Updates)

For text-only or text-centric feed posts (the classic LinkedIn status update), the hook lives in the first 1–3 lines of your post. These are what show before the “See more” cut, so they must carry the weight of attracting the reader. Key tips for text post hooks:

Keep it Short and Snappy: LinkedIn gives roughly 210 characters before truncating the post . That often amounts to 1–3 short sentences. It’s wise to use line breaks and even one-sentence paragraphs to make the opener punchy and easy to scan . Dense blocks of text will turn readers off at a glance. Many top creators like to write 3 brief lines as their hook, sometimes even with one-word or one-phrase lines for dramatic effect (e.g. a single line saying “Unbelievable.”). This creates white space and visual breathing room in the feed.

Start with a “Scroll-Stopper”: The very first line is critical – Justin Welsh, a prominent LinkedIn influencer who also has an awesome course on creating LinkedIn content, , says the first line is “more important than 95% of the rest of the post” . It needs to immediately resonate or intrigue. One proven tactic is to make a bold or contrarian statement that appeals to your target audience’s experience. For example, Justin often uses what he calls a “relatable enemy” as a scroll-stopper . He’ll pinpoint something his B2B audience dislikes or struggles with, and take a stance against it. In one viral post, he opened with: “The 9 to 5 is getting pummeled.” – a sentence that fired up readers who resent the traditional office grind. Think about your audience’s common pain points or villains (e.g. bureaucracy, inefficient processes, outdated advice) and consider opening by “throwing rocks” at that enemy . It instantly creates a “heck yes!” moment for readers who feel the same way.

Ask a Provocative Question: Questions are natural hooks because when we see a question, our brain automatically starts searching for an answer. A well-placed question in your first line can entice the reader to pause and mentally respond – and then seek your post for the “official” answer or perspective. For B2B, this could be something like, “Why do 60% of product launches fail within six months?” or “CEOs, would you pay a 10% higher salary to cut employee churn in half?” . The question should be relevant and thought-provoking – ideally something the reader can’t answer immediately without context, which means they’ll need to read on. One technique is the two-part question hook : “Do you ever feel ___? Have you noticed ___?” This can validate the reader’s experience in the first question and then broaden or surprise them with the second.

Use a List or Numbered Promise: List posts are very popular on LinkedIn, and starting your hook by signaling a list or a specific number of tips can draw attention. For example, “ 3 lessons I learned from losing a big client last year:” or “ 5 trends in AI that every healthcare CIO should know:” . The number in brackets or numeral form stands out visually, and it also tells the reader your post is structured (which busy professionals appreciate). Just make sure the listed items themselves are compelling and not generic. A twist like “…and #3 is counterintuitive” in your hook can tease that the list contains a surprise, further increasing curiosity.

End on a Cliffhanger or Teaser: However you start your hook, consider ending the visible part with a “cliffhanger” punctuation – typically a colon or an ellipsis or a single tantalizing word. This is a classic journalism and social media trick. For example: “Our churn was at 2%. Then I saw one metric, and everything changed:” or “Most CFOs do X. That’s why it fails. Here’s what actually works:” . The colon at the end implies “see more to get the answer.” Questions (like “Why?” or “How?”) also function as cliffhangers in LinkedIn posts . Justin Welsh often ends his 3-line hooks with a short question, e.g. “And I love it. Why?” , explicitly prompting the click for the explanation . The key is not to be too coy – give the reader enough context to know what topic/benefit is at stake, but stop right before the “aha” or reveal.

Make it Relevant to B2B: Since we are focusing on B2B audience, adapt your language and references accordingly. This might mean using industry jargon sparingly (only if it truly resonates), referencing business outcomes (revenue, KPIs, ROI, etc.), or citing roles (CEO, PM, Sales Lead) in your hook. For example, a generic hook like “I finally fixed a major problem.” could be made more B2B-specific and hooky as “I finally fixed our 30% bounce rate problem .” – now a B2B SaaS marketer or product manager is intrigued both by the result and the mention of a known metric. You want your ideal reader to see themselves (or their goals/problems) in your opening lines.

Pro tip: Some LinkedIn creators write the body of their post first, then craft the hook last – distilling the most interesting point or benefit after the content is done . This can ensure the hook is tightly aligned with your message. Also, consider A/B testing different hooks by repurposing the same content with new openers over time to see what style your audience responds to . Above all, be clear over clever: a hook that plainly signals value or intrigue will outperform one that’s overly cryptic or cute . “Clear + curious” beats confusing-but-witty, especially in the professional context.

Hooks in Image Posts and Carousels

LinkedIn allows posts with a single image or document attachments (which display as swipeable carousel posts). In these cases, visuals and text must work together to hook the viewer:

Image Posts (Single Image with Caption): If you share a standalone image (e.g. an infographic, a photo with overlay text, a chart, etc.), that image itself becomes part of the hook. Bold, eye-catching visuals can stop the scroll, but you should also craft the accompanying text caption’s first lines carefully. Often, a strong strategy is to let the image carry one part of the hook and the text carry another. For example, the image might contain a short, provocative statement or question in large font, while the caption’s first line complements it with context or an additional teaser. Imagine an image that says, “The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email?” in big letters, and the caption starts, “We calculated how much those pointless meetings cost – and the number is brutal:” . That combination plays off each other to hook the reader. In B2B, visuals that show data (charts, graphs) or bold typographic statements can draw interest. Make sure any text on the image is easily readable on mobile. High-contrast and large font is key if you expect people to notice it in the feed.

Carousel Posts: Carousels have become popular on LinkedIn for sharing multiple slides of content (like mini-PowerPoints). The first slide of a carousel is essentially the cover – treat it as a visual hook akin to a magazine cover or book title. It should have a clear, enticing headline or image. For instance, if you create a carousel titled “10 SaaS Onboarding Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)” , put that title big and bold on slide 1, maybe with a relevant image or design. The goal is to get the user to click/scroll to slide 2 . Just like a text post, you might add a curiosity element: e.g. slide 1 could say “10 SaaS Onboarding Mistakes” and a subheading “…#7 cost us $50k” to spark intrigue. Meanwhile, the caption of your post is still important – the first lines of the post text can highlight the value: “After 5 years in SaaS, I’ve identified the top 10 onboarding mistakes that may quietly be driving your customers away…” and then prompt the reader to “see the slides” for details. The combination of a catchy slide 1 and a compelling intro caption can significantly boost engagement on carousels. For B2B topics, carousels are great for step-by-step guides, case studies, or any content that benefits from visuals (charts, screenshots, diagrams). Use the hook to promise that swiping through will be worth the reader’s time (e.g. actionable tips, a story unfolding, etc.). Also, each slide can have mini-hooks to keep people swiping – e.g. ending one slide with a teaser (“But there’s a catch… ->”) that resolves on the next slide.

Consistency of Hook and Visual: Ensure that your visual and textual hooks match in tone and promise . If your image shows something shocking but your caption opens in a bland way (or vice versa), you create a disconnect that can confuse or lose the reader. For example, if you post a dramatic chart plummeting downward, don’t open the caption with a meandering preamble – instead, address the chart: “Yes, that graph is real – and it’s how we saved $2M by eliminating one expense…” . Align the message so that image and text amplify each other’s hook.

Hooks in LinkedIn Videos

Videos auto-play in the LinkedIn feed (usually muted by default), which means you have a dynamic element to leverage for hooking viewers. However, attention spans for video are even shorter – viewers often decide within 1–2 secondswhether to continue watching or scroll past . Here’s how to hook with video content:

Start Strong Visually: The opening frames of your video should have an immediate hook. Because videos play silently until clicked, use captions or big on-screen text in the first seconds to convey your hook if it’s speech-based. For example, if your video is a talk or a voiceover, display a bold text snippet of the most intriguing point right at the start. One LinkedIn video tip from community experts is to literally duplicate your text-post hook onto the video’s opening scene . For instance, if your accompanying post text starts with “Is John Doe the most curious person in real estate?” , you might flash that exact question in the first second of the video, or have the speaker immediately pose it out loud . This way, even someone scrolling with sound off gets hooked by the question appearing on the video itself.

Leverage Movement and Pattern-Interrupts: A static talking head might not hold attention unless the content of speech is extremely compelling. If possible, begin your video with some movement or a pattern interrupt – something visually non-standard . This could be a quick series of cuts (to create curiosity – e.g. 1-second glimpses of three slides you’ll explain later), an unexpected scene (e.g. you doing something attention-grabbing relevant to the topic), or simply large kinetic typography animating your key hook text. The idea is to avoid the “slow fade-in and introduce” approach. Jump right into content. For example, instead of starting a B2B tip video with “Hi, I want to talk about cloud security,” you might start with “Your cloud is probably already hacked. (Pause) Here’s why.” – stated in the first 3 seconds, with the text “Your cloud is probably already hacked” flashing on screen. That jolt can hook a viewer to keep watching for the explanation.

Keep the Caption Hooky Too: Just like other posts, you will likely have a text caption accompanying your video when you post it. Don’t neglect those first lines just because the video is the star – they still need to entice someone to stop and maybe unmute. Use a strong text hook/caption that either complements the video or even summarizes the tease . For example: “[VIDEO] We bet a month’s salary on an AI tool – and it paid off. ��” could be a caption that intrigues a potential viewer. If the video content is a bit of a slow burn, sometimes the caption can hint “wait for it…” or “skip to 0:30 to see the outcome” to ensure people know there’s a payoff.

Address Pain Points Early: In B2B videos especially, viewers need to know why they should invest time. One strategy is to state a painful problem or pressing question right up front. E.g. “Sales prospecting sucks? It doesn’t have to. Watch this…” or “Ever had your project budget slashed unexpectedly? Here’s how to still succeed (video):” . If you speak in the video, consider opening with a question or statement that calls out the viewer (“Manufacturing managers, do your lead times keep stretching?”). This both hooks and filters the right audience to continue watching.

Optimize for Silent Viewing: Since many users won’t turn sound on, use captions/subtitles for any speech (LinkedIn has auto-captioning, but review for accuracy). Also, use visuals (slides, titles, props) to tell the story so that even on mute someone can grasp the gist for the first few seconds. If they see something compelling happen silently (like a bold claim on screen or a before/after visual), they may then tap for sound or continue watching. For example, a product demo video could start by showing the end result first (a dazzling dashboard or a quick clip of a problem solved) with a text label like “Results �� 200% traffic spike”. That outcome-first approach can hook interest, and then the video can rewind and explain how to get there.

Video Length and Teasers: On LinkedIn, shorter videos (under 2 minutes) often perform better in the feed, but if you have a longer video, make sure to hook throughout. Similar to Jasmin Alić’s “rehook” concept for text, in video you might introduce a mid-video hook – a twist or new piece of info around the 30-second mark to re-engage viewers. This could be an unexpected insight ( “…but here’s the twist: the real issue wasn’t the budget at all.” ), a second question, or a change-up in visuals. Essentially, if your video goes on, don’t let it plateau – inject a new curiosity spike partway. This keeps those who clicked “See more” on your video engaged till the end.

How Top LinkedIn Influencers Use Hooks (Examples & Tactics)

Successful LinkedIn creators often develop a personal style of hooks that their audience comes to recognize. Let’s examine a few notable B2B influencers and how they approach hooking their readers:

Justin Welsh – Templates and “Scroll-Stoppers”: Justin is known for systematizing his content creation. He often shares that he turns high-performing posts into reusable templates – including the hooks. One of his signature hook formulas is the Relatable Enemy > Hero > Teaser sequence (as mentioned earlier). For example, he might start with calling out a pain point ( enemy ) in a blunt way (“The 9-to-5 job is getting pummeled.”) , then flip to a positive opposite ( hero ) (“The great resignation is growing faster than ever.”) , and finally drop a one-liner teaser (“And I love it. Why?”) that forces a click . This plays on emotion (dislike of corporate grind), social proof or trend (many people quitting), and curiosity (why does he love it?). Justin also frequently uses numbered list hooks. In the “viral list” category of hooks, a template attributed to him is: “X [lessons] I wish I knew before I [did Y]” . This introspective, almost contrite framing (“what I wish I knew”) attracts readers because it promises hard-earned wisdom (social currency + practical value). Another Justin Welsh example: “4 business models to achieve financial freedom (that don’t involve managing a big team)” – here he uses a negative qualifier in parentheses to make the hook even more powerful by addressing an objection . His hooks are typically very direct and benefit-driven , often with a contrarian or “I’ll save you pain” angle. For instance, “4 tips to grow your audience without posting daily” – a hypothetical Justin-style hook that appeals to those overwhelmed by conventional advice.
Key takeaway: Justin Welsh’s hooks succeed by being extremely clear about the topic and benefit, while adding a twist that sets up curiosity (like promising an easier path, or poking at a common enemy).

Jasmin Alić – Storytelling and the “Rehook”: Jasmin (often known as Jay) is a copywriter and strategist who emphasizes narrative in posts. One of his cited hook styles is the “Rude Awakening” story . For example, a Jasmin hook template goes: “I once [did something ordinary for a client], [and got an unexpected/shocking result]. I felt [strong emotion]. Here’s how it played out…” . This style pulls you into a mini-story right away with a first-person anecdote, plus the promise “here’s how it played out” acting as a cliffhanger. It works because readers love concrete stories (it’s specific: “I once did X for a Y and Z happened”) and it triggers an emotional hook (surprise, embarrassment, triumph). Jasmin is also a big proponent of maintaining momentum after the hook. He coins the term “rehook” for a mid-post reinforcement that keeps readers engaged . For instance, if his hook sets up a story, a few lines later he might drop another intriguing piece of information or question to re-spark curiosity before interest wanes. On LinkedIn Audio or Video, this might be analogous to a hook at the beginning and a twist in the middle. In text, it could be as simple as a one-line paragraph that teases “But here’s the twist…” or “What happened next changed my view on X.” Jasmin explicitly says: “A hook is 90% of a good post… but if the rest of the post doesn’t follow the same energy or promise, it falls apart.” . So he ensures his content delivers a payoff and often circles back at the end to the hook’s setup (completing the story or lesson).
Key takeaway: Jasmin uses story-driven hooks and double-hooks (hook + rehook) to captivate readers, and he underscores that an initial hook must be matched by equally engaging content, otherwise it’s a clickbait dead-end.

Jake Ward – Outcome-Oriented Hooks: Jake Ward (a serial entrepreneur and content creator) often grabs attention by highlighting impressive results in his opening line, then hinting at how it happened. A template from Jake’s posts is: “I [achieved X impressive result] in [short time frame], and it led to [tangible outcome].” . For example, he might say “I landed 5 Fortune 500 clients in 30 days, resulting in $250K in new ARR.” as a hook, which is extremely specific and enticing to a B2B audience (who wouldn’t want to know how that was done?). This style works on the success story angle – it promises practical value (you’re about to hear how to replicate a success) and also taps a bit of social proof (showing credibility by referencing big clients or big numbers). Jake’s hooks are typically no-nonsense and number-driven , appealing to readers who like data and proof up front. He often follows through by breaking down the steps in the post (fulfilling the implicit promise of the hook). Another example approach: Jake might start with a mini case-study teaser, like “Our startup’s website traffic flatlined in Q1. By Q3, we 5x’d it without increasing ad spend. Here’s what changed:” . This combines a problem + solution + curiosity about the “how,” all in two sentences.
Key takeaway: Consider using “outcome hooks” as Jake does – lead with the end result or achievement that your target readers would find remarkable, then use the rest of the content to explain or narrate how you got there.

Nat Berman – Value-First, No-Fluff Hooks: Nat Berman (a content entrepreneur) focuses on actionable business advice. His hooks often cut straight to either a pain point or a valuable tip with zero fluff. For example, Nat might begin a post with: “Busy founders: your 16-hour workdays are killing your startup’s growth. Here’s why working less can achieve more:” . This kind of hook calls out the target audience (“busy founders”), identifies a pain or counterintuitive point (overwork harming growth), and promises an explanation or solution. It’s clear, speaks directly to a B2B scenario, and arouses curiosity (work less to do more?). Another approach he might use is a quick do/don’t contrast: “Stop measuring vanity metrics. Start closing deals using this KPI instead:” – the hook itself gives a tiny piece of advice (don’t do X, do Y) but also invites the reader to learn the specifics (what KPI exactly?). Nat’s style is authoritative yet straightforward – he builds trust by getting to the point. A reader sees his hook and immediately knows what they’ll get (and that it’ll be worth their time).
Key takeaway: A direct value proposition in the hook can be very powerful in B2B. If you can summarize a key insight or challenge in a punchy one-liner, do it. You might worry about giving away too much, but professionals appreciate efficiency – if your hook tells them exactly the problem you’ll solve or insight you’ll discuss, and that problem is one they have, they’ll click eagerly. Just make sure you indeed have unique value to deliver when they do.

It’s worth noting that many of these influencers mix and match hook styles. They might use lists one day, stories the next, and questions another time. This keeps their content fresh. But all of them are consistent in one thing: they never waste the opening line. There’s no “Hi, I just wanted to share…” – they dive right in with the most compelling angle. They also study what works ; several keep swipe files or libraries of successful hooks (their own and others’) to inspire future posts . Emulating this habit can help you refine your hook-writing skill.

Beyond Clickbait: Delivering Value After the Hook

Finally, an essential perspective: a hook is only as good as the content that follows it. In a professional context, holding attention is not the goal in itself – providing value is. A cheap trick or sensational line might get you a click or two, but if the reader feels let down or misled, you’ve lost credibility (and likely any future attention from that person). Here’s how to ensure your hooks serve a meaningful purpose:

Match the Energy & Keep Your Promise: As Jasmin Alić wisely put it, if the rest of the post doesn’t carry the same energy or fulfill the promise of the hook, “it’s going to fall apart pretty quickly.” If you hook someone with a bold claim ( “We cut churn in half in 3 months” ), you must in short order explain how , with real insights or story – otherwise the reader feels duped. Ensure there’s a clear line from your hook to your conclusion: the hook poses a question or issue, and your content answers or addresses it thoroughly. One practical tip is to write the hook first as a promise , then outline what points you need to cover to satisfy a reader who came for that promise. Alternatively, write the content first (as mentioned earlier) and then derive a hook that accurately reflects the most interesting aspect of that content. Either way, there should be no bait-and-switch . For instance, don’t open a post implying you’ll share “the secret sauce to LinkedIn Ads” and then deliver generic advice like “be consistent.” The hook and content need to align in specificity.

Provide Unique Value or Perspective: Hooks are powerful only when backed by substance. In B2B especially, readers crave actionable insights, fresh data, or experienced perspectives . Use hooks to highlight that unique value, not to mask a lack of it. If you find yourself crafting a flashy hook for a thin piece of content, pause – it might be a sign to beef up the content itself. The best approach is to earn the hook : do you have a surprising case study, a contrarian viewpoint backed by experience, a framework that helped you achieve something notable? Build your post around that, and let the hook serve as the enticing entry point. This way, when the reader clicks “See more,” every line they read further rewards their decision to do so. They learn something new, gain a tip, or at least enjoy a good story. “Only use powerful hooks if you have content and perspective that is uniquely valuable,” as you noted – this is a mantra worth following. The Internet has plenty of clickbait; set yourself apart by coupling attention-grabbing hooks with actual expertise or thoughtful analysis .

Avoid Overhyping and Maintain Trust: In the quest to be interesting, some writers go too far into hyperbole or sensationalism. It’s a fine line: you want to stand out, but not at the cost of accuracy or trust. In B2B, credibility is everything. So, for example, instead of a dubious hook like “This AI will end marketing as we know it ” (which smells like hype), you could temper it to “This AI made me question everything I know about marketing.” – still intriguing, but now it’s positioned as your experience (authentic) rather than a grandiose prophecy. If you use numbers or facts in your hook, make sure they’re correct and sourced if necessary. If you cite “80% of startups fail for reason X” in your opener, you should be prepared to mention the source or at least have it on hand – your savvy readers might wonder. Maintaining a reputation for honesty will make your future hooks more effective , because your followers know “when I click this, I won’t be disappointed.” In contrast, if you resort to bait-and-switch even a few times, people will start ignoring even your milder hooks. Consistency matters.

Engage and Invite Interaction: A hook can also set the stage for engagement, which is a form of delivering value too – the value of conversation. Sometimes phrasing your hook as a genuine question or debate can lead to rich comment discussions, where you and others add value beyond the original post. For example, “Is the 4-day work week failing or succeeding? Here’s what our team found…” . You share your findings, but you’ve also implicitly asked the reader’s opinion. If your content shares a perspective and then invites others to weigh in with theirs, that’s a valuable exchange for a professional audience. Just ensure the initial content still has meat; readers should feel they gained something before they give something (their input) in return.

Close the Loop: If your hook opened a curiosity gap, close it by the end . This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly common to see posts that start with a great question or story and then trail off or diverge without addressing the hook’s setup. This leaves readers unsatisfied. Think of it like a movie that builds up a mystery and never reveals the answer – frustrating! For example, if your post hook is “Our product launch tanked despite 6 months of prep. Here’s the hard lesson we learned:” , be very clear by the end of the post what that lesson was and how you learned it. Don’t make readers guess or fill in the blanks. A satisfying resolution not only educates your audience but also reinforces the effectiveness of your hook (the reader says, “Ah, I’m glad I clicked – that was worth it”). It also subtly trains your audience that your posts are worth reading in full , which makes them more likely to stop next time they see your name with an interesting opener.

Practice Ethical Hooking: In B2B especially, your personal or brand reputation is on the line. Powerful hooks should never stray into misinformation, inappropriate baiting (e.g. using shock imagery or language that isn’t professional), or manipulation. It’s certainly possible to be edgy and professional at the same time, but always sense-check: does this hook align with my brand values and the expectations of my audience? If you’re a cybersecurity expert, for example, a hook like “I hacked into 100 bank accounts yesterday…” might grab attention but could be misleading or damaging out of context. Reframe it to “I simulated hacks on 100 bank accounts – here’s what I found.” Now it’s accurate and still compelling. Remember that on LinkedIn, your content often ties back to your real professional identity; maintaining integrity will serve you far better in the long run than any short-lived viral trick.

In conclusion, the art of the hook is about balancing creativity and clarity , and marrying attention with value . Classic copywriting gives us time-tested techniques to grab attention, psychology and frameworks like STEPPS explain why those techniques work, and modern LinkedIn influencers show how to execute them in today’s B2B landscape. A great hook earns the right for your message to be heard – but it’s ultimately what you say after the hook that determines whether you’ll win hearts, minds, or business.

Use hooks as a tool to highlight your unique perspective and expertise, not as a smokescreen to hide lackluster content. If you have something important and valuable to share, you owe it to that idea to frame it in the most compelling way possible. As a final thought: think of your hook as a service to the reader – you’re helping them quickly see why your content is worth their time. Do that effectively, follow through with substance, and you’ll not only capture attention on LinkedIn – you’ll hold it and build lasting trust with a professional audience that knows your content is consistently worth the click .

Strategies vs. Tactics: What They Are, How they're Different & Connected, & Why You Should Care

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 13:36:15 GMT

People confuse strategies and tactics all the time, and simple definitions are inadequate.

Does it even matter?

The answer is an undeniable – yes. Too often, leaders don’t grasp the difference until it’s too late; then hindsight kicks with the inevitable realization, “I was being too tactical and forgot about strategy.”

We won’t let that happen to you.

This article will demonstrate the separation and connection points between strategies and tactics, affording you a much clearer notion. Be prepared – we’ll dive deep into the nuances but also provide a crisp marketing strategies and tactics example using an Amazon case study.

How Strategy Fits in with Strategic Planning

With all its subtleties, strategy is a language in and of itself. When we think of strategy within the broader GOST framework for strategic planning (a model for goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics you can find here) it’s clear that the S represents strategy. However, people often refer to strategy as the entire plan for your company or initiative.

Point being, strategy can be an umbrella term for planning. The irony is that when people say, “our strategy is X, Y, Z,” they often mention goals, objectives, and tactics, leaving strategy out.

The Components of Strategies and Tactics

With the pervasive confusion around these two terms, let’s take a closer look to define and understand them.

Elements of a Strategy

Strategies are your plan for how you’ll drive competitive advantage to achieve long term goals. They are typically not tangible, which is why people struggle to define the term. Strategy is not about targets or numbers or concrete actions, they are the areas of focus for how you choose different actions and results vs. the competition.

Why do strategies get forgotten? Their intangible nature is why they get left out. They are difficult to develop because a strong understanding of your market, customers and competition is needed in order to create differentiated, enduring strategies.

Strategy Pressure Test: The key to getting strategies right

Here’s a trick for pressure testing if you have a genuine strategy: you must be able to choose to say “No, I won’t do that” in order for it to be a bona fide strategy. Why? Because the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Elements of Tactics

Tactics are the specific, tangible actions that help you achieve your strategy. They are shorter term and more opportunistic in nature than strategies. They are the detail on how you will activate your strategy.

Why are tactics mistaken for strategies?

The hard work of developing a strategy (research, data analytics, internal assessments, etc.) is often jettisoned in favor of short term, tangible tactical plays. Paradoxically, you may appear more organized and productive when you go right to the tactics because tactics are easier to recognize and follow.

Always be cautious when you work with a marketing agency that has an incredible arsenal of tactical activations, but little wherewithal for what your marketing strategy is and should be.

A simple example of strategies and tactics

Knowing how strategies and tactics fit together puts you in a stronger position to help achieve your goals.

Say you want to go from New York to Los Angeles (your goal) by the end of the month while seeing three tourist destinations (an objective). A strategy without tactics is like saying, “We’ll head west,” but not bothering to book an airline ticket or rent a car or use a map. Yeah, you might get there with last minute plans and hitchhiking in the dark, but even if you do, it will cost you time and be more arduous than if you come up with a plan for how you’re going to get there.

Tactics without a strategy, on the other hand, are more like buying a map of Cleveland (because it’s on the way, right?), renting a car, and booking a flight to Montreal because you heard there might be a connecting flight to LA. The result is a lot of busy, tactical actions, with very little to show for it. It might look like progress, but it’s probably just commotion.

Having a clear strategy for getting to Los Angeles and defined tactics for carrying it out will make your trip faster, less expensive, and a lot more fun.

How Are Strategies and Tactics Different Yet Related?

The above slide show the separation and connection of strategies and tactics; notice the overlap in the how aspect of each.

Strategies are your plan for where you’ll put your focus in order to achieve your goals and they break down into two components, where and how:

“Where” Strategy

When we talk about the “where” of strategy, we’re referring to the strategic domains that help set your business apart: the industry, geographic regions, consumer segments, and so on. For example, an online bank that specifically serves American college students has a well-defined industry, region, and consumer segment.

“How” Strategy

The “How” of strategy is either low cost or differentiation. In some cases, a company might do both, but more typically, it will focus on either being cheaper than the competition or differentiated (e.g., more convenient, more exclusive, better customer service, etc.).

A bank may choose focus their how strategy on helping college students prepare for adulthood by being smarter about their money, differentiating vs. other banks on campus.

Tactics are the other part of “how.” They’re the specific, actionable steps that you can take in support of your strategy.

Using our college bank example, tactics could include creating products that help your student customers build a credit history, get affordable student loans, and learn basic budgeting skills.

How to Connect Strategies and Tactics Together?

Here’s a trick.

The relationship can be made simple by writing out a strategy statement.

Take a look at the Amazon example below. Take the strategy, then link it to the tactic with the addition of the word by to create a strategic statement. A strategy statement will contain a holistic view of the strategy plus tactic working together.

Drive awareness of Amazon lockers in Whole Foods (strategy) by sending an e-mail campaign to existing Whole Foods customers (tactic).

This makes the relationship between strategy and tactics clear.

Conclusion: What Understanding Strategy & Tactics Means for You

Don’t fall in to the trap of confusing strategies and tactics. You can’t achieve your goals and objectives by being tactical alone, at least not for long. The benefit of a well-crafted strategy is that it points your business efforts in the proper direction to drive growth and sustainable competitive advantage. If your strategy or tactics are missing, vague, or poorly understood, getting clarity on what they are allows you to course correct.

Poorly defined or non-existent strategy?

Put in the hard work of identifying strategies that deliver a unique mix of value vs. the competition and distinctly help you achieve your goals, and focus your energies there. (EBOOK LINK)

Does your strategy meet our pressure test – could you say no to doing it?

Remember that the essence of strategy is choice. You must choose where to focus and where not to focus in order to drive differentiated value.

Few to no tactics?

Plan out the tactical actions that best support your strategy, as in our Amazon example.

If you get it right, you’ll see the forest for the trees, and craft strategic plans that solidify competitive advantage.

We hope this has helped clarify the difference between strategies and tactics.

Now we’d like to hear from you—do you have questions? Ideas to add? Examples from your own experience?

An Easy Paid Per Click Audit Strategy: Four Simple yet Powerful Questions to Ask Your Agency

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 13:41:34 GMT

This article is for small business owners who want to their agency accountable, cut wasteful spending, and focus for profitability. Learn crucial Paid Per Click metrics and how to align your audience, ads, and landing pages for maximum conversions.

This is not your typical how to guide to conduct a Google Ads Paid Per Click audit; those are too technical and difficult to follow. This is about developing a curious and strategic mindset: an audit can be easy if you ask the right questions.

The ROI for Google Paid Per Click /Search Engine Marketing Ads is There

Google paid search advertising, also known as search engine marketing (SEM) or PPC (pay-per-click), can be the fastest and easiest way for small businesses to attract customers who are actively searching for their products and services. By leveraging Google Ads, businesses can target specific keywords related to their offerings, ensuring their ads appear at the top of search results. This not only increases visibility but also drives highly relevant traffic to their websites, potentially leading to increased sales and brand recognition. The immediacy and precision of Google paid search campaigns make them an invaluable tool for businesses looking to quickly connect with their target audience.

According to Google, “we conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.”

Maximizing PPC Success: Avoiding the Pitfalls of the ‘Set-it-and-forget-it’ Approach

That’s an earth-shattering statistic! However, almost every time I do an audit for a potential client, I see something drastically different: A “set-it-and-forget-it” approach laden with wasted spend, void of a meaningful strategy.

Don’t Blame the PPC Agency – Teach Yourself the Basics So You Can Drive Results

Small business owners get fleeced by PPC agencies all the time, but you shouldn’t blame the agencies managing your account. You need to learn how to work with them. Don’t be satisfied with that Google PPC report you get once a month and never look at. It’s up to the small business owner or leader to take accountability, and to know enough to be dangerous (I can’t believe I just typed that - is it 2004?). We’ll get you reviewing your Google paid advertising like an expert.

The ROI for Google Paid Per Click /Search Engine Marketing Ads is There

According to Google, “we conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.”

Source.

Maximizing PPC Success: Avoiding the Pitfalls of the ‘Set-it-and-forget-it’ Approach

Don’t Blame the PPC Agency – Teach Yourself the Basics So You Can Drive Results

Even with AI and all the flashy software that keeps popping up, the key to winning in paid search is strategic thinking around your audience, the ad itself, and the landing page experience.

You don’t need to be a technical wizard. You do need to spot and correct big mistakes, unearth new opportunities, and give your agency a kick in the butt when they need it.

Four Simple but Powerful Questions to Ask Your SEM Agency

We start with these four business strategy questions. These questions will help you see the forest for the trees, and gain a greater perspective of how your account is setup and performing.

1. Are we targeting my ideal customer with ads that match their search intent?

To supplement this question, ask:
What keywords are we getting the most conversions from?
What keywords are we spending the most budget on?

2. Do I have my priority products and services (e.g., most profitable) featured in the ads?

3. Do the PPC ads link to a landing page that provides a good customer experience?

Does the landing page relate to the intent of what the customer searched and get the potential customer to do something, like fill out a form or call me?
Think about how the following interconnect:

The search terms a customer types in Google
The words featured in the Ad copy
The landing page copy and experience

If the keyword your customer typed is "Used Blue Honda Civic", the Ad Headline should feature "Used Honda Civic" and the landing page should also relate to "Used Honda Civics." If the search volume is there, you might consider getting more specific and having this customer flow include the word blue.

4. What condition is my paid search account in on a scale form 1-10?

1 as abysmal, 10 being great
This is the rating either you, or a non-biased third party should perform
Want help getting a grade for your PPC account? Book a PPC STRATEGY CALL
Use this determination to motivate the person managing the account to improve. If you’re managing the account yourself, get ready for a self-flagellation (most likely)

Don’t underestimate the power of the simple questions above. Answering these will get you in the top 90% of small business SEM accounts.

Let’s go through some additional conversation points you can cover in your next paid search agency call. Yes, you need to talk with your agency.

Technical Questions To Get Comfortable Asking in a PPC Audit

Asking the below will help you shape a well-rounded view of what’s working and what’s not working. You can adjust the time period of the data as you see fit, but always ensure you are looking at apples-to-apples time comparisons.

How much budget have I spent in the last 3 months?

How many conversions have I gotten in the last 3 months?

If Google says you have 214 conversions over the last 3 months, but in reality your sales have not increased, you need to focus on the right conversion metrics that matter. Agencies love vanity metrics, and you need to defend again them obscuring reality.
You can replace conversions with any high-level metric, like number of products sold, number of customers acquired, leads, etc.

What was my cost per conversion in the last three months?

You can replace cost per conversion with metrics like CAC (cost to acquire a customer), CPC (cost per click), or Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Tip: If you know you CAC (cost to acquire a customer), see how far you can scale your PPC campaign before your CAC is prohibitively high

Ask your agency what your main KPIs are according to them - you'll want to align sharply on these.

Do my campaigns and ad groups within them relate to my most important products and services?

A campaign is a set of ad groups and ads that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings
The general idea here is to get at the proper account structure

Are any campaigns, ad groups, or ads, doing particularly well (e.g., have the lowest cost per conversion)?

You should have a strong sense of your best performing and worst performing ads

Why are some ads performing well?

Is it because there is high demand to capture, or because you wrote compelling headline copy?

Are other ads failing because the competition is too intense, or because your headline copy is confusing or weak?

Should we bid more on high performing ads and less on low performers?

A quick highlight for my two favorite questions to ask. These two questions tie so much together...

What is my search lost IS (impression share) due to budget?

"Search lost impression share (budget)" estimates how often your ad didn't show on Google search sites due to low budget.

Agencies always want you to increase your budget and spend more, because it makes their job easier and gives them a scapegoat for low performance. Now you can say, “What is the percentage of our impression share lost due to budget?” If the percentage of impression share lost due to budget is low, like 20%, then it’s not a budget issue.

If you have a high percentage here, say 70% or above, you should consider increasing your budget.

What is my search lost IS (impressions share) due to rank?

"Search lost impression share (rank)" estimates how often your ad didn't show on Google search sites due to poor Ad Rank.Ad Rank determines your ad position and whether your ad is able to show at all. It's calculated using your bid, ad and website quality, context of the search, Ad Rank Thresholds , and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.
If budget isn’t the problem, and you’re not showing up in top spots due to rank, then you need to do the following:

Review your ads to make sure they have strong headlines, descriptions, and other copy sections. Review the landing page each ad send traffic to. Will your potential customer see a landing page relevant to the ad, with compelling information that gets them to take the desired action you want, i.e., gets them to convert? Or is there a disconnect between the ad and the landing page?

Going Even Deeper

What search keywords (the keywords your potential customers type in Google) are driving the most conversions?

What is my bid type?

Main options are maximize clicks vs. maximize conversions. Google is much better at maximizing conversions nowadays, so this should be the default as long you have enough data to feed the algorithm.

What should my max bid amount be?

How much you're willing to bid plays a major role in where you'll show up in Google. In order to determine a max bid, you need a solid sense of predicted ROI. Here's a max bid formula:
Max Bid = CLV (customer lifetime value) X conversion rate
Let's say you're Dollar Shave Club. Even though you sell cheap razors, you keep a customer for an average of 18 months buying blades, which equals $75 in gross revenue. Let's say $30 of that is profit. If you take the $30 in profit and multiply it by your conversion rate, let's use 5% for this example, your max bid would be $1,5 If you had double the conversion at 10%, you could bid $3.0 and still be profitable.

Another Critical Area to Optimize: Negative Keywords

This is table stakes, and you need to BE ON IT. When you first set up your campaigns, you need to have your agency or person managing the Google account finding and marketing negative keywords daily. Yes – daily! This is especially important if you are running broad match, with let’s Google algorithm choose very loose keywords related to the keywords you’ve provided in the account.

For Example, broad match keyword targeting for “luxury homes” may direct keyword traffic for “modular home under $20k” to your ads. Is a $20k modular home a luxury home? No. So you need to make modular homes part of your negative keyword list.

In general, exact match or phrase match are better to start out with for keyword targeting. However, Google’s algorithm does get better and better, so once you have your sea legs in search marketing, you can get bolder and try broad match, as long as you commit to reviewing keywords driving people to you ads, and adding negative keywords, every single day.

What are the conversion values for my expensive vs. cheaper products and services?

You can have a serious advantage in paid search if you tell Google what services are worth the most. By embedding conversion value for you most profitable services, Google will priorities these conversions and work harder to get them for you. Ask you agency how to assign different conversion values to each of your offerings.

It goes without saying that you need the right conversion tracking and goals set up with Google tag manager. If you need help setting up conversion tracking, this is a specialty of ours – (book a conversion tracking call). Google analytics is an important free tool to optimize your campaigns, but you can stick to your Google Ads account for now.

A/B testing

Neil Patel has a nice and simple article on this here. I recommend starting with test for headline and descriptions, and using a BOLD vs. LITERAL vs. CREATE CURIOSITY style approach. If you using responsive search ads (RSAs), the tests happen automatically. Just ask to see which deadlines and descriptions are top performers vs. the rest.

Conclusion: Take Action and Review Your Google Ads Account Yourself or With Your Agency

If you ask the four simple strategic questions I shared, you’ll be in excellent shape to audit and optimize your Google PPC account.

Remember, a PPC audit isn't about convoluted technical jargon; it's about accountability from a small business leader's perspective. It's about forging a clear link between your business, the customer, the overall experience, and the outcomes you aim to achieve. Keep yourself grounded in reality by asking strategic questions to build a foundation. Ask deeper, more technical questions to pop the hood and make sure you're getting the most you can from your agency and Google campaigns.

Want help with your PPC audit from Strategy Kiln?

Is a Fractional CMO Worth It? The Answer with a Pros and Cons Force-Field Analysis

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:41:19 GMT

What is a fractional CMO in simple terms?

Simply put, a fractional CMO provides strategic marketing guidance and helps execute it a part time leadership role as a contracted member of your marketing team.

They are someone with broad as well as specialized experience in building brands and driving business growth. As a part-time CMO, they’re different than a full time CMO because they have other clients; this can be both an advantage and disadvantage to the relationship. A fractional CMO will have an intense curiosity and desire to get to know your customer and developing marketing initiatives to get more of them. They help you manage your entire marketing department to solve the biggest challenges you face. They should complement your current business capabilities, and be humble individuals despite their deep expertise.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of a Fractional CMO's responsibilities, how much they work and earn, the advantages and disadvantages of hiring them, and how you can get started, and a bit on how to find one. Towards the end of the article, you'll find a visual force field analysis that assigns value to the pros and cons of hiring a fractional CMO to aid in your decision making process.

Acting as a fractional CMO myself, I hope you find this article useful. I've taken measures to ensure I give you a well balanced picture with all the cons and drawbacks for you to consider that other content may glance over.

What business problem does a fractional CMO solve?

Entrepreneurs and small business leaders are notorious for being good at building a business, but bad at marketing it for growth. Small business and start-up leaders typically find themselves focused on managing operations, business model development, and all the other priorities of running a business: marketing often ends up being de-prioritized and pushed to the side.

Additionally, the word marketing doesn’t always hold a positive connotation, and business owners are often afraid of associating with it because they find it egotistical or manipulative.

I’ve spoken with countless small business owners who’ve tried hiring a marketing agency or spending money on paid ads, like Google, and had a bad experience and no results. The standard comment is something like “My company spent $40k on Google ads a few years ago and I don’t think we got anything out of it.”

The root cause of this ineffective marketing is typically the acute lack of marketing leadership and no understanding of who your customer really is; a fractional CMO acts as the key to unlock how to attract your ideal customer and wisely allocate your marketing dollars. If you have a strong core business but challenges around getting leads and acquiring new customers, a fractional CMO can help you craft a growth engine to scale.

How many hours does a fractional CMO work?

This of course varies, but I’ve seen 5-20 hours per week as the standard. 10 hours a week is an average time commitment, and what I personally find works best.

How much does a fractional CMO cost?

The range here is varied as well, in the ballpark of $75 to $750 dollars per hour. A sweet spot average charged for someone who has 10+ years of experience and a solid track record will be around $200. The industry you’re in, complexity and scope of the project, contract duration, and availability of qualified individuals with the skillset you need will have a major weighting on cost.

How to ensure a good fit when hiring a fractional CMO

You’ll want to map your business challenges with the fractional CMO passions and experience. If your goal is to build a strong visual brand identify, does this person have a strong track record there? Does the person have the industry knowledge, or experience in my exact vertical? If you want to build a sales funnel or marketing automation strategy, does the person have the technical chops and know how to guide this process?

Given the importance of this person’s role in your organization, I recommend having a fractional CMO candidate take a strengths assessment, such as the high 5 test .

Similar to the Gallup’s Strengths Finder assessment, but free, this psychometric test gives you a view of what the candidate is good at, as well as where their passions lie and what energizes them.

Counterintuitively, you want to find someone that might turn you down. The great ones out there pick and choose who they want to work with and will even have a waiting list.

Fractional CMO services and responsibilities include:

As a senior marketing executive, they work with your management to mesh with your overall business strategy and corporate level strategy and define a winning marketing plan.

After assessing your current marketing efforts, the fractional CMO shares a plan that lays out the gaps in your approach and accompanying strategies and tactics to fill them

Help identify or flesh out your value proposition with an intense focus on customer needs and the customer experience

By understanding the relative value that your product or service provides, the fractional CMO can propose value-based pricing strategies to ensure you maximize profitability

Help hiring the right marketing talent to build the team you need, or manage a marketing agency on your behalf
Identify trends in the market, competitive set, and your customers that you can capitalize on
Build a paid, owned, and earned sales and marketing funnel to attract new customers and increase loyalty with your current customer base

Paid Media Management: Everything from top funnel paid activities like direct mail, TV, paid social, and radio to bottom funnel actions like Google paid search (SEM)
Owned Media: Owned asset strategy like your website and e-mail nurture plans, including marketing automation and conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Earned Media: PR efforts like securing articles in relevant publications for your customer

Brand identity and strategy work to ensure you’re building a unique brand presence that builds a bond with customers
Aligns with business goals and sets marketing goals and KPIs you can measure in order to gain insights that helps you scale for immediate growth
In most cases, you’ll want someone who is not only strategic, but digitally savvy and hungry for data analytics to optimize your campaigns – this is something everyone says they do, but rarely is it done is a meaningful and impactful way

Five Pros and Five Cons of Fractional CMOs

Pros of Hiring a Fractional CMO:

The benefits are centered around having a clear market leadership vision and accountability for results.

1. Expertise & Fresh perspective: a new and hungry visionary

You get someone who has not been drinking the Kool-aid your company. They bring a fresh outlook, mindset, and playbook for how to look at things differently and win. If you have a distinct gap in customer loyalty, you can get someone who excels in exactly this area. Hiring a fractional CMO will give you an infusion of energy to start tackling new projects that drive growth.

2. Productivity: A strong GSD attitude to perform

A good fractional CMO should be highly efficient, getting as much as possible done within the compressed time they have working on your business. Ideally, they’ve been there and seen it before, and can hit the ground running with quick wins from day one.

As opposed to the standard fits and starts with marketing, you should have a unified strategy that’s all managed by the fractional CMO. They should take the burden off of senior management, and supercharge the efficacy of anyone else on the marketing team with high standards for producing.

3. Easy to hire and fire: Breaking up isn't hard to do

The flexibility of being able to hire and fire someone much more easily can be a major benefit. Depending on the growth stage of your company, your needs will constantly evolve; you may need a digitally focused fractional CMO for 6 moinths and more of a brand strategist for the next evolution of your company. You don’t want to be frenetic, but you can easily change the shape of who you fire based on where your biggest problems to solve are.
Tip: Depending on your needs, you can have a month to month longer duration commitment. Although a longer term commitment is viable in some cases, a month to month duration keeps flexibility for you, and motivation for the CMO, at its peak

4. Cost effective: More hourly cost, less annual cost

Although you initially balk at the hourly rate, the annual pay for a fractional CMO is highly attractive and much less. A fractional CMO charging $150 per hour at 10 hours per week is only $78,000 per year, versus the annually salary of $312,000 hiring that same person at full time would cost you.
Tip: The hourly nature could mean that the fractional CMO is incentivized to take longer to product results. The way you, as the business owner, can ensure this doesn’t happen is by monitoring productivity and making sure goals are being set, tracked, and achieved within appropriate time frames.

5. Accountability for Results: High performers at this level are driven by tangible results

Having someone in a full-time position makes them more like part of the family, especially in small businesses. The fractional CMO is not about small talk at the water-cooler, they’ll enter your business and propose a plan with results attached to it, and be hyper-focused on proving their worth immediately. If they fail to meet those results, it’s easy to part ways and find a better fit. With results at the center of the relationship, you have a more motivated partner to continuously produce and demonstrate ROI to keep their contract intact.

Cons of Hiring a Fractional CMO:

Be careful of hype and the short terms nature of the role.

1. Hype & Ego : Always a worry when hiring a marketer, perhaps an even greater watch-out here

Marketers are notorious for promising the world and overwhelmingly underdelivering. You need to have your radar on and detect if the person is all hype or the real deal. Fantastical adjectives like – “incredible results fast!” or “the ultimate growth secrets to 10x your business in 30 days” should start dinging the alarm bells for you to. Look elsewhere. Beware: buy the hype and have a downfall like Skype.

2. Short Term Focus: Quick wins at the cost of long term gains

Though possibly a pro in terms of needing immediate results, the limited hours per week mean that building longer term plans may be constrained. If a 5 year strategy is what you’re looking for, you’ll need to be explicit about priorities and be willing to accept trade-offs against your short terms needs.

3. Stretched Thin: Too many clients, so you suffer

Other clients and priorities mean your fractional CMO does not have you 100% on their mind. If they don’t enjoy working with you, your company culture, and the opportunity, they may give you a half-hearted effort. If your business has absolutely no notion of what marketing is and why it’s important, the fractional CMO may be able to work 2 hours a week and charge you 10, and you’ll still be happy with meager attention and results, simply because you don’t know any better. Similar to the caution against hiring someone all about hype and ego, do your best to seek out someone with integrity that you know has bandwidth to take on your projects.

4. Old Fashioned: Out of touch & not able to execute

Some of the greatest CMO that ever lived may be the worst match for your company if they have the wrong thinking. Digitally channels have eclipsed traditional vehicles in terms of overall spend and ROI, but an old fashioned CMO may not be up to speed with what you need. You need to find a balance between someone who has that raw strategic intelligence you need to figure out what the priorities should be, but also someone who knows how to layer digital channels together, get a/b testing up and running fast, and the where with all to not just let Google Ads burn your dollars. A true blend of classical marketing and digital savvy is rare and in high demand.

5. Dislocation: Feeling the pain after departure

Just like how Exxon may show up to your country, make you wealthy for 5 minutes, and then decimate the land and prosperity once they leave (wow that got heavy), the fractional CMO departing is a serious risk. If the fractional CMO creates an awesome plan, but is the only one who knows how to execute it and they leave, then you just lost your date to the prom (wanted a metaphor a bit lighter than the Exxon one). Make sure you are building capabilities within your organization, and getting adequate knowledge transfer from the fractional CMO. Ultimately, you want the fractional CMO to bring a sustainable marketing model to your company, not bring it to a halt when they leave.

I created a force-field analysis showing the pros and cons of hiring a fractional CMO. You can see that hiring a fractional CMO can offer significant advantages but the cons carry weight as well – what does this look like when you assign your own values to each section?

Conclusion – Do you Need a Fractional CMO?

After reading the above, you should have a better sense of whether or not a full time or fractional CMO model makes sense for your business. A good fractional CMO should make it seem like you’re in-housing your marketing department, not outsourcing it. In many cases, the fractional CMO may be your entire marketing department, but they typically need a team to help execute marketing functions.

If you’re downsizing your marketing efforts due to a challenging economy or reduced budget, a fractional CMO may serve as exactly what you need to keep marketing at the forefront while reaming cost effective.

Where to Hire a Fractional CMO

One of the most established fractional CMO hubs is Chief Outsiders - see what they have to offer here . If you want to work with Strategy Kiln, we’re happy to share our no hype approach to understand the critical factors of your situation that will drive growth.

Bad Strategy & Good Strategy: How to Tell the Difference

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:40:42 GMT

Good strategy and bad strategy are always fighting each other. Sadly, it looks like good strategy loses the battle; Forbes cites less than 10% of leaders exhibit adequate strategic skills.

Richard Rumelt’s classic book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters, acts as an antidote to books with highbrow strategic fluff. This article summarizes key points form the book with frameworks and slides to help you execute the ideas. The focus is a bit more on the signs of bad strategy in an effort to help you avoid the pitfalls.

What Does a Good Business Strategy Look Like?

Similar to how Plato grappled with defining the “good,” defining what “good strategy" looks like can be problematic. Rumelt’s book offers three essential guideposts for good business strategy :

What are the Sources of Power in Good Strategy?

Good strategy is born out of reinforcing actions that harness collective power to the point of greatest impact, like a perfect baseball swing where the bat smacks the ball right on it's sweet spot to generate the greatest kinetic energy. These sources of power provide the necessary resources, leverage, and decision-making capabilities to drive the strategy forward.

According to Rumelt, the sources of power include:

Leverage: This involves analyzing the competitive landscape and identifying areas where the organization has an advantage or where competitors are struggling. By strategically exploiting these imbalances, organizations can gain a competitive edge and make resourceful decisions that maximize their chances of success.
Constraints: Rather than seeing constraints as limitations, organizations can view them as opportunities for innovation and creativity. By understanding and embracing constraints, organizations can find unique ways to leverage their resources and make strategic decisions that effectively address their limitations.
Proximate objectives: Proximate objectives are specific goals that are essential steps towards achieving the overall strategic goal. By setting objectives that are achievable and realistic, organizations can maintain a sense of momentum and progress, leading to increased motivation and morale among employees.
Chain-link systems: A chain-link system involves the coordination and alignment of various activities and objectives within an organization. Each action in the chain is carefully designed to contribute to the overall strategic objective, creating a cohesive and well-coordinated strategy.
Design: Effective strategies often resemble designs more than decisions. They are meticulously constructed, not merely chosen. Strategies are designed to align various elements, policies, and activities to focus on competitive advantage. Striking the right combinations can yield substantial gains, while misalignment can be costly.
Focus: Concentrating efforts on fewer, yet more significant, objectives often yields greater rewards. Business strategists may choose to dominate a smaller market segment over a larger one, focusing on targets that capture attention and influence opinion. Perceived effectiveness influences support and participation.
For example: Completely transforming 2 schools can have a more profound impact on public opinion than making a 2% improvement in 200 schools.
Competitive advantage: Businesses must leverage their unique capabilities to deliver lower costs or greater perceived value. Competitive advantage hinges on the ability to sustain it, often through isolating mechanisms like patents, reputation, relationships, or economies of scale. The true art of competitive advantage lies in enhancing its value through strategic insights.
Growth through acquisitions – Dynamics – Inertia – Entropy

How Does Complexity Affect Strategic Concepts?

Complexity plays a huge role in shaping strategic concepts. Strategic concepts should be developed taking into account the need to navigate the overwhelming complexity of the business landscape.

Complexity stems from numerous interconnected factors, such as technological advancements, market dynamics, and socio-political influences. These factors form a web of relationships that often defy easy categorization or prediction. Rumelt emphasized the importance of understanding complexity in his work, arguing that the failure to comprehend complexity often leads to template-style strategies that lack coherence and fail to address the underlying problems.

Developing a coherent strategy requires deep understanding of the environment, the competition, and the organization's own capabilities. It involves identifying sources of advantage and patterns of advantage that can be leveraged for success. This understanding allows strategists to navigate complexity, identifying proximate objectives that contribute to achieving larger strategic goals.

Let's consider a case with Wal-Mart. Their strategy of offering low prices and providing a one-stop shopping experience for customers was a well-managed chain-link system that tackled the complex challenge of reducing storage costs and improving logistics. It involved innovations in supply chain management, leveraging economies of scale, and streamlining operations to offer lower prices to consumers.

Complexity significantly influences strategic concepts. Understanding and navigating overwhelming complexity is essential for effective strategic decision-making.

Developing a Coherent, True Strategy

Developing a coherent, true strategy is crucial for any organization to achieve its goals and objectives effectively. A true strategy goes beyond generic template-style strategy and takes into account just how complex our world and business landscape is. It involves identifying the key challenges and patterns of advantage in the competitive situation and leveraging them to create a competitive advantage. It requires a deep understanding of the sources of power and the ability to translate them into pragmatic ideas and coherent action. Developing a coherent, true strategy involves setting clear financial goals and proximate goals, which serve as milestones towards achieving the overarching strategic objectives. Aligning the organization's actions and resources towards a pivotal objective while also keeping an eye on blue-sky objectives for future growth and innovation are key.

For a deeper look at what strategy is, see our article on:

Good Strategy Is Simple, But Not Simplistic.

With that in mind, here's the fastest way to side-step a convoluted strategic planning process.

We can admit there's no perfect shortcut to good strategy, BUT this is the best framework I've found that can be employed to layout strategies in a pinch. Does this slide example with Amazon meet the criteria laid out by Rumelt? Is the diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action evident? I believe so; that's why I think this "shortcut" can get the job done.

If you want a framework with all the strategic bells and whistles, our GOST framework is comprehensive and what you're looking for. Check out our:

The Easiest Way To Know If You Have A Real Business Strategy

We’ve all heard that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” I have a simple and easy way to apply this idea, making it a pressure test to help you spot a true strategy from a false one. You must be able to say “NO, I won’t do this” in order to have a bona fide strategy. Let me explain. If you were a hospital, you wouldn’t be able to say “No, patient safety is NOT a priority.” Every hospital has patient safety as a critical, table stakes priority. Therefore, it’s not a strategy, because it’s not differentiated from any others hospitals. ALL hospitals should have patient safety as a focus, so it doesn’t pass muster as a true strategy. This hospital example illustrates one of the most widespread bad strategies out there; labeling what everyone already does in your industry, and perhaps must do as, as part of your strategy.

Sometimes a look at what to avoid helps strengthen your vision for what you need to do.

Examination Of What Makes Good Strategy Become Bad Strategy

To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks:

Here's a simple list of some signs of bad strategy:

No focus, full of fluff
Avoid facing brutal truths
Does not start with question
Is too ambitious and not executable
Does not link to core capabilities and is not reinforced
You can’t say NO to it
Often focused on goals

Rumelt calls out an especially bad example of a strategy one of his clients shared: "Our strategy is customer-focused disintermediation." Does it get any fluffier than that?! A strategy is not abstract orders and jargon. It's not even all about the future or where you hope to be.

Strategies can – and often should be – proximate.

W hat problems are you facing today? Have you examined and analyzed anything so you can find your strategy?

Good and bad strategies can become difficult to identify during business planning. Once planning season is underway, you may find yourself presenting strategies to senior management, getting feedback, and simply executing a "Frankensteined" version of what you strategically want to do, plus what senior management gave as feedback during the planning process. Business planning is rarely a creative, swing for the fences affair. Senior leaders, especially in large corporate environments, know how difficult it is to execute. This inclines them to water down strategy into something much easier to execute operationally. Take a look at your strategies and intentions before and after business planning feedback happens. Do your strategies get stronger and clearer, or weaker but perhaps tactically easier to execute?

Conclusion

Don't turn to the dark side of bad strategy. Confront brutal truths with courage, but don't be the marvel super hero who thinks it's all about bold entrances and over the top action scenes.

Employ patience and deep thinking to find simple solutions to the problems you face. Everyone's surprised when they see a real strategy, because they're scarce.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple two months before bankruptcy, his simple strategy was to cut the Apple computer line down from 15 to just 1. Wall Street thought it spelled certain doom, but his proximate strategy was to survive. Would you have been able to make that call?

Bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy. It grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunctions. Once you develop the ability to detect bad strategy, you will dramatically improve your effectiveness at judging, influencing, and creating strategy.

- Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy

If there's no problem, there's no strategy.

- Strategy Kiln

Good strategy is coherent action backed up by an argument, an effective mixture of thought and action with a basic underlying structure I call the kernel. A good strategy may consist of more than the kernel, but if the kernel is absent or misshapen, then there is a serious problem.

- Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

Jumbo List: 45 Types of Business Strategy You Need to Know

Tue, 16 May 2023 13:34:14 GMT

Despite the infinite list of business strategies that exist, the most I found in a single article online only shared 10. I’ve jotted down this jumbo list to get all the strategy types I had top of mind in one place, aiming to get a sense of the strategic universe. This is crammed with organizational level strategy, guerilla strategies, Porter’s generic strategies, and quite a few more. Keep in mind, the detail is high level; this list is about magnitude, not depth.

To boil things down, I once heard a wise man say "it's all about building the brand and driving growth." Keep in mind the hierarchical nature of strategy; building your brand and driving growth will likely be high level goals your subordinate strategies should ladder up to. Also, monikers like "competitive strategy" can be dangerously vague. Do you need to focus on the competition? Or should you instead be intensely focused on customer strategy? Some company's, like Amazon, don't frame their actions in terms competitive strategies because of their strict customer focus.

We all joke about how “there’s an app for that.” The same goes for strategy; there’s one for everything. Even with this huge list, there’s plenty to add. In fact, I overlooked “emergent strategy.” This is ironic because it’s perhaps the only strategy that actually exists; it’s the only one that becomes implemented. It’s a strategy created to respond to unplanned events, new information, and new objectives. Emergent strategy is a polished way of admitting “our crystal ball fell on the floor and broke again, but we’re being strategic about it.”

Any other strategies not make the list? Let us know.

1. Organizational Strategies

These types of business level strategies include corporate strategy and other subordinate strategic agendas.

2. Corporate Strategy

This is the top of the organizational strategy pyramid, where long term goals and objectives are defined and other strategies cascade underneath and within. Think of how the corporate strategy of Alphabet determines how Google and other subsidiaries maximize profit by creating a somewhat closed ecosystem for each business unit.

3. Business Unit Strategy

This is strategy formulated at the level of a particular business unit, such as the personal care business unit of a big player like Unilever, that guides the unit’s overall objectives.

4. Functional Strategy

This strategy seeks to improve the implementation of business and corporation strategies. It can include a multitude of other strategies, such as production strategy and marketing strategy.

5. Program-Level Strategy

A marketing activation of some kind, such as a seasonal campaign, where strategy is developed and executed.

6. Operating Strategy

A more granular level of goal setting for specific areas of a business unit, such as certain geographic zones, e.g the Northwest sales region.

7. Acquisition Strategy

Purchasing and merging with another organization to drive synergy and growth

8. Financial Strategy

Using business context to maximize value creation for the enterprise and stakeholders.

9. Generic Strategy

Michael Porter defined four “generic” strategies that drive competitive advantage:

10. Cost Leadership

Gaining a competitive advantage by reducing the cost of production and passing cost savings to the customer in a broad market.

11. Cost Focus

Competing based on price to target a narrow market. You may not be the lowest-priced brand overall, but you’re the lowest price relative to your direct competitive set. For example, Rite Aid may have higher priced soda vs. Dollar General, but if it is priced lower than Walgreens, this is a cost focus strategy.

12. Differentiation Leadership

Differentiation leadership is characterized by offering a distinct positioning to a fairly broad target market, focusing on the main needs and wants.

13. Differentiation Focus

Offering unique features that fulfill the demands of a narrow market. A good starting point for smaller firms that don’t want to compete with larger players head on.

Porter's generic strategies above are helpful for identifying, at a high level, where you want to put your emphasis to win in the marketplace. A good approach to using this blog to inform strategic thinking: choose one of Porter's generic strategies to focus on, and pick one or several of the other strategies in this list to help reinforce that high level strategic position.

14. Operational Strategy

Often controversial as to whether this is a true strategy, as opposed to a best practice, this refers to eking out the greatest efficiency possible in business activities, with manufacturing as a prevalent focus area.

15. Fast Follower Strategy

Letting a competitor take on the risks and costs of establishing a market beachhead, then entering the market yourself.

16. Blue Ocean Strategy

The strategy of creating an uncontested market space by pursuing both differentiation and cost leadership.

31. Consumer Strategy

Understanding the needs, wants, desires, pain points, etc. of your target market in order to win preference and loyalty.

32. Segmentation Strategy

Delineating between consumer groups across demographics, psychographics, and behaviors and choosing the most appropriate target given your business proposition.

33. Audience Strategy

Similar to a segmentation strategy, often greater in number and linked to digital campaigns. Also known as cohort strategy.

34. Social Media Strategy

Attempting to appeal to customers on social channels by interrupting their online conversations with potentially relevant products or services based on their social media profiles and actions.

35. Content Strategy

Driving business objectives by developing assets like blog articles, video, and other information that delivers customer value.

36. Outdoor Strategy

Using outdoor advertising, primarily billboards, to attract and engage customers.

37. Grass Roots Strategy

Handing out flyers or knocking on doors in your local community.

38. Media Strategy

Choosing the right media vehicles to interlock with and deliver digital, consumer, and higher level strategies.

39. Pricing Strategy

Pricing your offering to deliver against your objectives. Lower pricing may increase market share. High prices may increase profit but reduce demand. You seek to capture the highest WTP (willingness to pay) vs. your cost of goods in order to maximize profitability.

The product lifecycle has a big impact on pricing strategy. This journey involves several key stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. During the growth phase, characterized by surging sales, smaller businesses often opt to maintain higher price points. This approach is effective when the product boasts unique features or superior quality compared to competitors. Customers are willing to pay a premium in these scenarios. Companies leverage high prices during the growth phase if they possess cutting-edge technologies in high demand.

40. Retail Strategy

How a retailers deliver a superior customer experience.

41. Personalization Strategy

An analytics-driven approach to deliver the right advertising and products to the right person at the right time.

42. Promotion Strategy

Leveraging tactics such as price markdowns and coupons in order to generate interest.

43. Connected Strategy

Development of a sophisticated customer feedback loop in order to deliver the greatest value possible with your offering. Similar to personalization strategy but with a greater scope that includes new product development, uses new revenue models, and incorporates new technologies.

44. Entrepreneurial or Small Business Strategy

The strategies needed to launch a new venture. Can include business plan development, gathering resources and investment, and go-to-market strategy.

45. Channel Strategy

How you get your product or service to the customer. You may decide to sell through online or retail partners, or employ a direct-to-consumer strategy, for example.

Time to take a breather from that long list!

When it comes to choosing the right strategy, whether at the corporate, business, or brand level, you'll want to ask yourself and your partners important questions like:

What level of risk are we willing to take? Some strategies are riskier than others.
Is now the right time to implement a new strategy? Counterintuitively, sometimes the best time to reinvent your business model and strategy is when everything is going well, so you don't end up like Kodak.
What businesses can we benchmark against? Find competitors who've placed big bets, and see who the winners and losers are.
Where is the current market today, and how will it shift in the near and long term. You should have a sense of immediate vs. long term change on the horizon.
Remember to coordinate and over communicate your strategic plans and decisions all the way from CEO to cashier - strategy is the sum total of all that you do.

Any strategies not make the list? I just realized that “global” and “local” strategy went unnoticed. Help make the list complete by sharing your thoughts.

Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas Template

Get our free 5 Best Strategic Frameworks E-Book

Completely Free

17. Price Skimming Strategy

Launching a differentiated product at a high price that only early adopters will pay in order to recoup investment costs, then reducing the price over time in order to expand your customer base. This can upset customers, as it did in the case of the initial iPhone launch in which Apple dropped the price of the phone by $200 just two months after it was launched.

18. Sales Strategy

Broadly speaking, this is how you position your offering in the marketplace. Can be as expansive as how your sales organization (sales people and process) is run and as granular as the sales strategy for a specific product or service.

19. Growth Strategy

A plan for expansion. This overarching strategy breaks down into four segments:

20. Market Penetration

Taking market share from existing companies by acquiring their customers.

21. Market Development

Exploring new markets or new customers, or expanding current markets.

22. Product Development & Innovation Strategy

Creating new products and processes.

23. Diversification

Diversifying your organization at any number of levels, from the business unit to product level.

24. Competitive Strategy

Positioning your business in a way that drives a unique proposition via a unique set of activities and resource utilization, to your customers vs. the competition. Remember, it's not just about creating value, it's about creating more value vs. you competitors in areas you both compete. The concept of competitive strategy relates to Porter's generic strategies – here's a helpful resource .

25. Marketing Strategy

There are too many different types of marketing strategy to list here, but maybe this will be enough to get you started …

26. Affiliate Strategy

Selling other companies’ products and services for a nominal commission fee.

27. Guerilla Strategy

Using your agility and ingenuity in order to defeat larger and clumsier competitors, often through surprising and unexpected approaches especially good at breaking through the noise. Often linked to viral marketing.

28. Go-to-Market Strategy

A plan for reaching customers and achieving a competitive advantage.

29. Human Resource Strategy

How human capital is attracted and grown within and organization.

30. Digital Strategy

Overarching term that encompasses how a firm leverages digital technology to create value and earn customers.

The 5Cs Marketing Framework in Depth with Tesla Example

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:29:55 GMT

What Are the 5Cs in Marketing?

The 5Cs marketing framework famously includes:

Context
Customers
Competitors
Collaborators
Company

It forces you to think expansively about the entire universe your business operates in, with a focus on your external environment. A simple tool on the surface, it provides a way to understand the present state of your business so you can attempt to predict, react, and create the future. This article goes in depth into what the 5Cs in marketing are, and also equips you with three 5Cs templates using a Tesla example. You’ll get actionable tools to use for each C so you can get started right away. Our goal is to make this strategy framework practical so entrepreneurs and start-ups can use it as easily as larger organizations.

Want to see how Tesla's marketing strategy looks using the 5Cs framework? Here's a link to multiple 5Cs templates you can edit and start using right away: DOWNLOAD 5Cs framework Templates .

How is the 5Cs Marketing Framework BETTER than the 3Cs?

It adds two important Cs, Context and Collaborators, to the 3Cs mix, allowing for an even more “outside in” perspective. The addition of these two Cs forces you to think broadly about your business situation, giving greater weight to the context your business operates in and how to collaborate with partners to gain competitive advantage. Kenichi Ohmae, the author of the original 3Cs concept, is one of the greatest strategic thinkers of our time. His book “The Mind of the Strategist” (link to the book on amazon) approaches strategy and strategic thinking in a philosophical way that becomes a part of you. Here are some great quotes by Kenichi , including:

How to Use the 5Cs Marketing Framework Efficiently

This tool can be as simple (low effort) or as in depth (time intensive) as you want it to be. It’s great for entrepreneurs and small/medium sized business because it doesn’t necessarily require deep analytics or rigor; even basic information can be powerful when put together on one page. The tool’s focus is to see your business holistically and find linkages to drive future strategy.

How to Start Using the 5Cs Marketing Framework?

One way to start is to spend 15 minutes filling out each section with the information you already have top of mind (disregard this step if you want to use research to inform fresh thinking). From there, you determine how much additional information you need based on where your knowledge gaps are. You’ll find tools to help you for each C in this article.

What Are Mistakes to Avoid When Doing a 5Cs Analysis?

Where Do the 5Cs in Marketing Fit within Strategic Planning?

The Analysis of the 5Cs in marketing kicks-off a situational assessment in the “open phase” of OCCAM. Strategy Kiln loves to showcase OCCAM’s Strategy Razor , our five-step process for strategic planning that includes two crucial ingredients that are often overlooked, strategic thinking and strategic leadership. We've got a post about OCCAM and have some free OCCAM Frameworks Available for download if you want to know more.

Why Are the 5Cs in Marketing Important?

If you want a clear marketing or strategic plan, you need a holistic and deep understanding of your company, customers, competitors, collaborators, and climate dynamics. The 5Cs will give you observations and data to analyze; as a next step you need to transform that data into key challenges and insights. From there, you’ll create your strategies and action plan.

Instead of telling you what you can plug into each section, I’ve written the key questions that you should ask. Asking good questions is the hallmark of strategic thinking.

The best place to start a 5Cs analysis is with context, looking at the external macro trends shaping the context your business operates in

What’s happening out there in the external landscape and how are you positioned to win?
What business do you actually operate in?
How has the industry changed in the last five years?
How might the industry change in the next 5 years?
How does the macro economy affect how you do business?
Do you perform better or worse during recessions?
How can you diversify to ensure sustainability during difficult times?
Based on mega trends, are you in a good position to win?
How is technology changing?
Is disruptive innovation a threat and/or opportunity?
Consider conducting a PESTEL analysis
What legal/regulatory rules or laws could impact your ability to operate?
Is your supply chain exposed to trade tariffs (e.g. products from China during the trade war) or shortages?

A practical way to understand broader trends shaping context:

Google Trends

Everyone LOVES Google Trends because it’s so easy to use. Go take a look at keywords like “keto diet” or “work from home” and see how these topics are exploding, leveling, or declining over time.

Customers is arguably the most important C of the 5cs in marketing. The essential question here is, are you able to articulate what your relationship with customers is like, how your customers are changing, and how you’ll adapt to better serve their needs vs the competition? A basic way to look at customers is from a new customer acquisition vs. current/loyal customer standpoint.

Current Customers:

Do we have a qualitative and quantitative sense of who your customer is?

Take a look at your sales data from multiple time periods. E.g. Look at the last 5 years of sales, annual view, monthly breakdowns, and even what sells on a daily basis can unlock insights

Who are your low/medium/heavy buyers?

What are the demographics/psychographics/behaviors that describe them, and how can we use this information to hone product and marketing decisions?

What customer problems do you solve? What are their needs, desires, motivations?

Is what you offering meeting their needs? What are their unmet needs?

Are there any customers we should stop serving?

What are the key customer learnings we have that can drive future strategy?

What are your most effective marketing channels and why?

What are your most effective creative assets and why?

New Customer Acquisition:

In terms of market structure, what are the largest customers groups and product/service segments
Where is the most growth, and are you prepared to serve the largest growth segments?
Are there any key needs we could serve but currently are not?
What do customers value and how can you provide that value in a unique way?
What are the biggest barriers and consumer misconceptions you need to overcome?
What are customer’s WTP (willingness to pay) and how are you positioned from pricing standpoint?
Are there customer groups you could appeal to with new marketing?

Practical ways to understand your customer

Pollfish or other Survey Tool

Create a survey to get answer to customer pain points and needs using your current audience, or use Pollfish
Pollfish will get you an audience of ~400 for ~$500. It’s something I plan to try myself over the next few months

Keyword Planner

It’s totally free to take a look at what customers type in google and get volume and cost estimates
Just type in Keyword Planner in google and you can figure out how to access it

Uber Suggest

Gives you three free searches per day, and it’s what I use to get a sense of high volume/low competition customer interest online

Competitive advantage comes from deep knowing how your competition and being different. It’s enticing to use competitive information to develop "me too" approaches; don’t fall for it. Use a tool like the Strategy Canvas to map your position, across key dimensions, vs. the competition and capitalize on the gaps. Here's a link to the post we wrote about the Strategy Canvas using Tesla as an example :

Who are the market share leaders and why?
Who has gained/lost share and why?
How are competitor’s business models similar or different?
Any new business models introduced that are small now but growing fast?
How can your competitor strategies help inform your own, where relevant?
Who are the direct and indirect competitors we face?
Who will the future competitors that will overtake the market look like?
What have the latest innovations been?
Are we competitive in terms of innovation (quantity, quality, and scale wise)?
What should we consider as a new approach to innovation, if needed?
Which competitors have strong brand equity and why?
Who are the regional winners and losers?
Who is winning on quality, price, or both?
Who has the best products or services and what unique capabilities allow this?
Who has the best marketing campaigns or brand image in the eyes of customers?

Practical ways to understand your competition

Facebook

Did you know you can go to any of your competitor’s Facebook page and see exactly what ads they have up, and how much their ad spend is for social/political agendas? Well you can – just got to the competitors Facebook page and find this Page Transparency box on the left side of the page, and from their you can “go to Ad Library” as shown above.

hrefs

This is another incredible free resource that lets you see a competitor’s domain authority (likelihood to get SEO traction in google), but more importantly, let’s you see what content (pages, articles, etc.) is driving the most traffic for your competition

This section of the 5Cs has different levels of importance based on become more your business grows and needs shift, you’ll need to review your roster of partners. Depending on how you want to treat this C, it can be focused on either internal or external stakeholders, or both.

Do we have the right business partners across all aspects of the business?
Should we partner with one full spectrum marketing agency or have several niche agencies that specialize in creative development, SEO, paid media, PR, etc.
Who wants to partner and win as much as you do?
Is there an opportunity to improve current relationships or engage new partners?
Is our technology helping or hindering us from being productive? What areas should we prioritize in terms of need?
Marketing agency partnership: Do we need a strategy, branding, or marketing campaign partner?
Marketing software technology: E.g. Are current email and website platforms capable of delivering what we need to our customers? You could pull in influencer partnerships here if they transcend a standard marketing outreach approach. As a practical tool, a RACI outlines how different stakeholder work together on a given project

Now it’s time to look inward. You’ll often see company as the 1st C. In terms of logic, I think it’s best left as the final C because this keep you focused on the external environment first, helping avoid bias. Then, you can bring it all together by seeing how your company is positioned. Make sure to be brutally honest in your assessment of your company’s position.

Given our 5Cs analysis, how well positioned are we in the face of challenges and opportunities?
How adaptable is your company?
Where will you be able to easily respond?
Do you need to more global and/or local?
Are we profitable?
Could we be more profitable?
How have we tracked vs. goals and objectives in the past?
Are brand equity metrics trending positive or declining?
Is there an opportunity to increase operations and reduce costs?
What assets do we possess that may be underutilized?
How can we reinforce current assets and operations to provide greater results?
What is your company culture like?
What are the top values we aspire to vs. what employees say we stand for?
Where are you currently investing capital?
Are these the right areas to invest?
What should you invest in for the long term?
What’s keeping you up at night?
What SHOULD be keeping you up at night?

One of the drawbacks of a 5Cs analysis is that it’s not a decision-making tool. You get observations and facts...

The goal is to draw initial business implications, and from there choose another approach in order to formulate a strategic recommendation.

You can incorporate a SWOT Analysis, either within the 5Cs marketing framework, or as a next step.

When used properly, the SWOT analysis makes an excellent complement to the 5Cs in marketing framework, using the data you’ve gathered from the 5Cs as inputs. Don’t think of SWOT as a data collection tool, a SWOT should drive strategic insight by linking strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats against each other, leading you to where your opportunity to grow exists. You can watch a dedicated video on the “SWOT Fusion Matrix,” or “TOWS,” which is a powerful recommendation version of the SWOT, here

Is the 5Cs Marketing Framework Better for Entrepreneurs or Big Businesses?

Most entrepreneurs don’t have the time to conduct exhaustive, research rich, months long strategic

plans like larger organizations. If you use the shortcut methods and tools I outlined above for entrepreneurs, you’ll be successful in getting the foundational data needed in order to conduct your 5Cs marketing analysis.

Summing it up...

How to use the 5Cs:

Keep the 5Cs as one slide for a high-level view, or break in out into multiple slides to tell a story
Can be used for annual planning at the enterprise, business unit, brand, or even product level and also works well as a method to bring new employees up to speed on how your business operates
Bolting on other tools, such as a SWOT and PESTEL analysis, leads to better decision making
Take a look and refresh it often; at least every 6 months

5Cs in Marketing Advantages

Simple, holistic view of your business

Flexible format can adjust to the level of detail you need in your analysis

5Cs in Marketing Disadvantages

Weak on actionable next steps without adding other tools like SWOT

Watch out for making the tool too simple (not enough data)

What are some pros or cons you’ve experienced with the 5Cs approach?

Any thoughts on how to get this off the ground in smaller organizations?

Let us know! Send us a message at questions@strategykiln.com

Context (Business Climate)

Customers

Competitors

Collaborators

Company

What is Strategic Leadership? A Balance of Contradictions

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:29:40 GMT

One of my favorite quotes, these words by Paul Hawken demonstrate the challenge strategic leaders face: they refuse to be late to the game and when they make bold decisions, not everyone likes them (it often gets personal) or their ideas.

Strategic leaders are frequently met with harsh skepticism because of the uncomfortable change they introduce. Darwin Smith, the legendary CEO of Kimberly Clark who led their spectacular turnaround and outperformed competitor and S&P 500 growth considerably, was initially challenged as unqualified by his own directors .

I’ve read ample articles on defining strategic leadership that outline the skills and traits required…

But there’s something missing.

The key to understanding strategic leadership is through the recognition of a contradiction - the tension between transformational vision and balanced pragmatism.

We’ll look at the nature of this tension with examples from Tesla and Amazon, a list of strategic leaders, and discuss how you can portray strategic leadership in your role.

Strategic Leadership vs. Leadership and Strategy

Let’s start by getting definitions out of the way…

You may not realize it, but strategy and leadership exist separately all the time. Becoming a strategic leader is harder than one might expect; not all leaders are strategic and not all strategists are leaders.

Leadership: My favorite definition of leadership is “empowering others to do great things.”

There is no necessity for bold strategy here, as you can certainly be a strong leader who manages day-to-day operational needs and interlocks with strategy without setting it yourself.

Strategy: My definition of strategy is posed as a question: “what are the critical factors of the situation, and what actions do I choose and connect in order to win?”

You can find plenty of consultants that may excel at strategy formulation yet lack leadership ability.

Rather than combining these definitions together, I propose giving strategic leadership a fresh definition, in the form of a simple equation.

Defining Strategic Leadership

Strategic Leadership = Transformational Vision + Balanced Pragmatism

Transformational Vision: Leans toward individual actions and choices

Futuristic Thinking: Anticipate and act on signals of change when others are skeptical, even with limited data
Risk: Willingness to take large risks, allocating resources away from proven channels and into uncharted, higher reward territories
Inspirational: Your vision becomes the vision of your employees through your commitment and passion
Mental toughness: Many people will doubt and challenge your ability, but you remain focused and unwavering

Balanced Pragmatism: Group minded actions and choices

Action Oriented: You find ways to make things happen using the data available to you, and recognize even transformational projects may need a staged approach
Business as Usual: Current operations and profit drivers are not forgotten or dismissed and reinforcing systems to support your vision are identified
Simple Clarity: You create visibility of your vision to everyone at all levels of the business, and find ways to reinforce current systems
Culture: You create a team culture of caring by leading through example, exhibiting a humble nature because although this may be your vision, it’s not about you

Tesla Got the Balance Right

Elon Musk had the transformational vision to help the world stop relying on fossil fuels with an all-electric vehicle brand. He went up against some of the largest companies and biggest brands in the world with unproven technology. He even launched the first Tesla knowing that defects and recalls were inevitable because there was so much to learn about the new technology.

This improbable dream would not have been achievable without an equalizing force; he balanced his vision with a pragmatic strategy. Tesla’s market entry in 2008 didn’t happen with a full line of cars and there was no extensive, capital intensive dealership network.

He launched just one vehicle.

Sure, the launch vehicle was a $100k sports car.

But despite the high cost, this focused strategy was pragmatic. Tesla was not operationally prepared for high volume sales yet, and needed to test and fail fast. This made a high-priced sports car the perfect choice. Tesla could appeal to early adopters who would love the technology and spread the word like wildfire. They would even be more accepting of product and issues recalls, because they likely had another car, with Tesla as their high-tech toy.

Initial success led to a gradual expansion: the Model S sedan, Model X Cross-over, and a down market play with the economical and affordable (sort of) Model 3.

It’s not just about creating a reality distortion field with an outlandish vision. Elon’s practical go to market strategy, that balanced the audacity of his vision, had at least as much to do with success in market.

Amazon got the balance wrong: the strategic leadership failure of the Fire Phone

On the other hand, Amazon launched their Fire Phone in 2014 without a scintilla of pragmatism, only operating in transformational vision mode. Jeff Bezos was doing iPhone like presentations, clamoring about the grand future of the phone. All of it’s amazing capabilities and integrations with Amazon Prime were being praised. The phone launched everywhere on all carriers with a massive marketing budget. I’m sure you remember hearing about the phone, but did you even for a second consider purchasing it vs. your Apple or Android phone?

Pragmatism was sorely lacking

Its $199 price point, with contract, was the same as the iPhone. People buy phones because of style, apps, and price. The Fire Phone was especially weak in apps and style, but high on price.

It turns out that a main thrust of creating an Amazon phone was to alleviate the competitive disadvantage of paying royalties to Apple and Android for purchases made through the Amazon App. Amazon wanted to avoid paying royalties more than it wanted to understand their consumer’s willingness to pay; this lack of pragmatism led to a $170MM loss on their balance sheet.

Strategic leaders to follow

The role of the strategic leader exists in this tension between his or her transformational vision and the need for pragmatism. It’s no easy feat for the mind to co-exist in these separate spheres simultaneously. When seen in action by great leader, this pendulum swing is a sight to behold.

These people have mastered the pendulum swing of strategic leadership

Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture

Fortune listed her as one of the "Most Powerful Women" in 2016 through 2019. She has a bold “Let there be change” strategy to Accenture in the post COVID environment, possessing a keen sense of how technology will shape the future.

A.G. Lafley

Former chairman and CEO of P&G, he’s made countless big bets with billion-dollar brands like Olay and Tide. He took the stodgy Oil of Olay brand and created the new “masstige” category of beauty products, competing with departments stores in mass retail. His book, Playing to Win, is one of my top five books on strategy.

Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Martha Stewart went from running her small catering company to becoming a cooking and home décor magnate. She combined incredible vision with a demand for pragmatic action across multiple business and brands. She’s crafted an incredible personal brand of poise, while also being a panelist for the roast of Justin Bieber. She was able to turn around her declining businesses from prison. She’s sees things no one else does, and takes a lot of risk. But she’s not a perfect leader - it’s said she has a dark side and does not handle criticism well.

Lee Iacocca, Former Chrysler and Ford Executive

A classic example of a charismatic, larger than life leader, he was also very strategic. The Ford vs. Ferrari movie paints the picture of Iacocca as an amazing communicator both internally and externally, putting aside old-fashioned pomp in favor of clear communication. He was the transformative visionary of the Ford Pinto (a major innovatin for American cars in the 1970’s) and the now ubiquitous minivan.

Peter Drucker

The godfather of strategy, he is to business what Da Vinci was to art. He brought a new level of integrated thinking and rigor to how businesses are run, and many of his principles are taken for granted today. He was intensely interested in innovation and execution to accompany his business philosophies. He foreshadowed the importance of new technologies and the acceleration of innovation. A prolific author. A humble genius. He’s even the inventor of SMART goals. Yeah, that was him.

Sara Riles, Online Business Mentor

Sara Riles is an entrepreneur I’ve seen pop up a lot lately. If you check out here website here, you’ll notice it exudes strategic leadership, with Sara at the forefront of the brand. Sara focuses on empowering women to bring the work life balance they’re looking for, with a full suite of programs, including a virtual assistant starter kit. She takes her transformational vision, and brings it down to earth, coming off as an approachable friend as well as a business maven.

Conclusion

Strategic leadership is defined by contradiction and duality; the careful balance of outlandish vision for what others cannot see and the pragmatism to drive results in the appropriate way.

Elon Musk knows this pendulum swing, tempering his bold new vision for Tesla by launching with just one vehicle to a narrow audience of early adopters.

The missteps of strategic leadership are characterized by an inability to manage this precarious pendulum. Jeff Bezos’ launch of the Amazon Fire Phone was transformational vision top-heavy, going full bore on a product that didn’t even have a value proposition that made sense; pragmatism was sorely lacking and the pendulum only swung one way.

If you can balance futuristic thinking with action, take big risks while maintaining day-to-day operations, combine mental toughness with a kind culture, and inspire people while offering crisp clarity on what needs to be done, you’re embodying the qualities of strategic leadership.

To help internalize strategic leadership, be observant and watch other leaders, especially individuals in your own organization, deftly swing the strategic leadership pendulum or, in contrast, merely focus on either strategy or leadership separately. Emulate people from the list I provided, like Peter Drucker and Sara Riles. Give yourself stretch projects that force you to confront the dualities so you can harness and use your strategic leadership abilities. It’s one of the lesser talked about business skills, yet markedly separates the good from the great.

"If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you´re too late."

- Paul Hawken

Maximize Your Focus: Two Easy Tweaks that Make the Pomodoro Method Work Better

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:28:17 GMT

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve tried quite a few daily rituals and gimmicks, and very few stand the test of time.

But somehow, someway, the Pomodoro method to carve out 25 minute chunks of dedicated time has stayed with me to become the cornerstone of my daily routine. It’s my one tried and true time management method to achieve focus.

I even asked a friend with ADHD to try it. He had been complaining about how procrastination and lack of focus plagued his work day, and I shared this article and my gave him some tips: He loved it and it worked! BUT, after using it successfully for about two weeks, he abruptly forgot about weaving it into his daily ritual and gave up on it. You need to be purposeful and intentional, and not let up on using this technique 3-4 times a day for a hyper-focused attack on your most challenging work.

What is the Pomodoro Method?

It’s a technique to help remove distractions and get you in a flow like state of productivity in 25 minute bursts of focus, called Pomodoros. It's a helpful tool for folks working full time as well as students looking for an edge in studying for the big test.

I’ll give you a quick and simplified version as I understand it. I’m stripping it down because I believe the constraints and complexity of the full-blown method actually reduce efficiency of the tool.

Simplified Pomodoro technique to increase focus:

1. Create goals: Pick a task or tasks to accomplish

2. Set a timer for 25 minutes

I use my phone timer but I’ve even used a Chrome browser plug-in before
Here's an online tomato timer tool you can use for your 25 minute bursts

3. Dedicate yourself to work uninterrupted for those 25 minutes to achieve your goal(s)

If you are interrupted or distracted, consider restarting the Pomodoro

4. Stop the timer and take a short break of 5-10 minutes

A rule of thumb for effective time management is to take a 5 minute break for a 25 minute pomodoro session, and a 10 minute break if you perform a longer 50 minute Pomodoro

Note: I’ll Repeat for as many Pomodoros as I can do while maintaining mental stamina.

Two easy tweaks to catapult efficacy of the technique:

1. Work with incredible intensity (like Kobe Bryant) for 25 minutes

2. Define what focus means

1. Working with Incredible Intensity

Intensity is key. If you carve out 25 minutes and work half-heartedly, you don’t really deserve the 5 minute break and this process is not worth it.

I remember what my boss from my first marketing job used to do: lean over his keyboard and put his face almost on the computer screen with a strange, tilted head position. His eyes looked up at the monitor with an incredible focus and he would type like a madman. He was relentless.

That was intensity.

I never adopted his strange head tilt and lean over the keyboard posturing, but he did inspire me by demonstrating what it really means to crank out work.

Not everyone has this natural reserve of focus and intensity; you need to ask yourself for it. Remind yourself what intensity and focus looks like. Motivate yourself with the reward of finishing work sooner and being proud of yourself. Productivity feels good.

Sometimes I think to myself, if I’m not typing as though my life depended on it like my old boss did, then I’m just not giving it my all.

Thinking about someone you admire with an ability to shut everything out except for what the immediate goal is. It may sound silly, but if you get a mental image of someone who possess the ability of intense focus, it can help you espouse that superpower.

Kobe Bryant is famous for his unwavering "mamba mentality." One of his most famous quotes is " Hard work outweighs talent — every time." See that look in his eyes? It's the look of relentless and optimal productivity. Here’s an article that illustrates Kobe’s insane work ethic with 24 real world examples .

So yes, I'm telling you to picture Kobe Bryant and emulate his intense ability to focus. Give it a 110%, even if it is just for a simple task and not game 7 of a championship. #mambamentality

2. Defining What Focus Means

You need to define what focus means, otherwise you’ll forget.

Here’s what I mean: You’re cranking away at a PowerPoint deck making some astonishingly attractive and poignant slides about new growth opportunities. Then your Outlook starts pumping out e-mails from your boss and you take a look. Next thing you know, you’re working on a different task. You’re still working, and this is an e-mail from your boss, but…

Your flow is broken.

When you return to your PowerPoint masterpiece, you’ve lost some of that magic you had before. This is the biggest trap for me. It’s not so much ensuring you have a good mental goal or task list for the Pomodoro, it’s knowing what your mental weaknesses are and what entices you away from focus. You must be incredibly strict about what you define as a distraction vs. a relevant task for the Pomodoro.

Make a list of what NOT to do.

You can also try segmenting Pomodoros. Pick Pomodoros by the mental state required. If you want to barrel through mundane work emails, set a Pomodoro just for that. If you want to be creative, choose tasks that fit within that mindset for that Pomodoro.

You need to customize and personalize your Pomodoros to make them work for you.

A few more tips…

Adjust the length of Pomodoros for whatever your optimal mental stamina is, whether it’s 15 minutes or 2 hours (that's a Kobe length extended Pomodoro). Consider having Pomodoros hit on the hour or half hour if it’s easier for you to time them. When you take a break, be careful not to erode your focus significantly.

If you play games on your phone for your five minute break, chances are you’re wasting mental capacity. The break should be about renewal; I’ll sometimes go for a quick walk or at least stand up at my desk.

Conclusion

This technique makes practical sense and it’s easy to employ nature make it the one productivity ritual that will stand the test of time. I hope the two easy tweaks can help add even greater clarity to how you define focus and what it means to bring intense focus to your work.

Have you ever used this technique, and if so, what have the results been? Any tips to improve it, or even other focus/productivity techniques worth considering? Let us now in the comments.

P.S.

I bought this Tomato timer on Amazon. Pomodoro means Tomato in Italian, and some folks online advised that the physical act of winding the timer helps somehow. I’m officially on the Pomodoro bandwagon.

Are you in sales and wondering where the time goes ever day? Give this article from our friends at SKALED a read . It directed towards time management for salespeople but has rich content and tips applicable to anyone.

GOST Framework: Goals, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics Explained with an Amazon Example

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:27:40 GMT

Do you believe in GOSTs?

No, we’re not talking about the sheet-wearing phantoms that Bill Murray blasts with his proton pack. GOST stands for Goals, Objective, Strategies, and Tactics; it’s a critical framework for strategic planning.

Have you ever worked in a job where it felt like people were really busy but nothing seemed to get finished? Or perhaps information was never translated across departments—or even from person to person?

Chances are one or more parts of GOST weren’t being communicated properly— or didn’t exist at all. The root cause of many business challenges is the lack of a strategic plan, clear visibility to that plan, and murkiness for how everyone fits in and is accountable to achieving goals.

Is the GOST model better than OGSM?

You’ve likely come across a similar acronym like OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures). Although very similar, what makes the GOST model superior to OGSM is that GOST explicitly has an S and T broken out, leading to clearer strategies. This elucidate how strategies and tactics are different yet connected, helping you avoid the pitfall of tactics with no real strategy behind them.

How to define goals, objectives, strategies and tactics?

One challenging with terms like goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics is that they’re often used interchangeably. Or, just as puzzlingly, they’re sometimes used to mean different things by different people.

Here’s our guide to GOSTs—a definition of each term that we’ll be using consistently throughout this article and on StrategyKiln.com.

We’ll be using a similar definition of goals and objectives as our friends over at HubSpot, as depicted in this image:

Goals

We start by defining goals vs. objectives. Goals are the desired results that you want to achieve at a high level. They are qualitative, long-term and help guide your overall direction. For example, a hospital’s goal might be to be the first choice pediatric care center in the region —a big, broad, long-term goal that can help guide that company’s choices and actions.

Objectives

An objective is not the same as a goal. Objectives are quantitative, specific, measurable outcomes that will help you achieve a goal. Objectives often include numerical targets such as revenue, sales, and market share. Sticking with our hospital example, a possible objective could be to increase patient satisfaction by 20% within the next 18 months. Often, you’ll have several objectives underneath an overarching goal.

Strategy

A strategy is a plan of action for how you’ll achieve your long-term goals. Strategies typically aren’t tangible, which may be why people often struggle to define the term. Strategy isn’t targets or numbers or concrete actions. It’s your choice for where to focus to drive differentiation or lower cost, or both, and how you will compete in the market.

How can I tell if something is a strategy?

Strategy must be what differentiates you from the competition. A surprising litmus test to tell if you have a “real” strategy is asking – “could I say NO to doing this?”

For example, a hospital can’t say that one of their strategies is patient safety because it’s a given that patient safety is every hospital’s concern (let’s hope, anyway). Your strategy cannot be what everyone else is already doing well, unless you somehow deliver incremental customer value. A hospital could say that one of its strategies is to improve the patient experience. They don’t have to do it, but it’s something that could set them apart from other hospitals.

Tactics

Tactics are the specific, tangible actions that help you achieve your strategy. If your strategy is improving patient experience, for example, your tactics might include sending patients a survey after every visit, improving hospital food, or better training for front-line staff.

For a deeper examination of strategies and tactics – check out this article dedicated to the topic.

Ever seen a GOST? Applying the GOST Framework with an Amazon Example

This holistic example should pull everything we’ve learned together and put it in context.

You can see from the diagram below that the GOST framework exists at different levels, with each level supporting the ones above it. You probably have an overarching goal at the corporate level that guides the entire company, then below that, you have a GOST framework for business units, and below that, you have GOSTs at the program level, for marketing, IT, operations, and so forth.

Corporate Level

At the corporate level, naturally, your GOST is going to be broad. In the case of an enormous company like Amazon, goals, such as “deliver more quality products to our customers faster than ever” are likely to be very big, with high level objectives such as, “Increase revenue by 30% year over year.”

Similarly, your strategy, which might be to “create omnichannel experiences across key growth industries” is quite broad, and the tactics that you’ll use to achieve that strategy, such as acquiring Whole Foods, acquiring Pillpack (which has since become Amazon Pharmacy), and expanding the AMZN Locker network, are big steps.

Business Unit Level

Now, these corporate strategies start to “cascade” down, informing GOSTs at the business unit level. Looking solely at the example of Whole Foods, the goal at the business unit level may be to leverage it into a leader in grocery delivery with an objective of increasing grocery market share from 2.5% at acquisition to 3.5% by 2021—a very specific, measurable outcome.

The strategies at this stage might include centralizing purchasing, adding Prime to Whole Foods brick and mortar stores, and driving micro visits with AMZN Lockers. Amazon doesn’t have to do these things to be a retailer, but these strategies are what differentiate it from other companies.

Tactics, of course, are specific steps that help achieve this strategy. At this level, they might include rationalizing vendors for economies of scale, creating in-store salience, and installing AMZN Lockers in Whole Foods stores.

Program Level

Now we cascade down to the program level—in this case, marketing, but IT, Operations, and many other departments will all have their own GOSTs that will support the business unit’s goals. Marketing’s goal is to introduce current customers to Whole Foods, and its objective is to increase new Whole Foods customers by 8% in 2021 while increasing micro visits by 10%.

Its strategies for accomplishing this might include driving awareness of Prime and AMZN Lockers in Whole Foods, while the tactics that support those strategies could include advertising and email campaigns.

Now you can say you’ve seen a GOST! Are your GOSTs clear and transparent—or shrouded in mystery? We encourage you to do a little GOST hunting in your own place of work.

Thank you for accepting all the puns from this article.

You can download the slides and GOST template for the Amazon example here.

If you have any questions or would like to share an example from your own experience...

There is also a video that accompanies this post...

About this Author:

Adam Fischer is a marketer with over ten years of experience in brand management and digital marketing. He’s challenged assumptions and taken bold moves to drive growth in roles at small businesses like Dogeared Jewelry and multi-billion-dollar companies like Nature Made Vitamins and CVS Health. His B.S. in philosophy from Northeastern University helps him ask questions that get to the heart of business issues. His M.B.A. in marketing from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU helps him thinking strategically about driving brands and growth.

15 Business Speak Phrases: A Garden of Business Jargon

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:27:10 GMT

It's Business Time

Admit it, sometimes you catch yourself spouting canned business speak clichés in a feeble attempt to look smart and buttoned up. We all do. Sometimes it’s harmless. Sometimes it’s downright excruciating for listeners on the receiving end of the buzz phrases.

This article is intended to be funny while hitting on some chords of truth. If you say one or several of these business speak phrases, it doesn’t imply you’re a bad person, it just slightly increases the chances that you might be. The following is a list, a garden if you will, of business jargon...

Proactive (The Genesis of Business Jargon / Business Speak Phrases)

The original, most overused business speak phrase that started it all. If your boss says something like “ let’s take a more proactive approach, ok Bill? ” it probably means you need more coffee. It could also mean “I have no idea what we should be doing, so let’s do it proactively.”

Let’s parking lot that

But Joni Mitchell, why would you want to pave paradise? The real translation is something like: “I’ve never wanted to avoid someone’s question this much, ever, so I’m going to write it down and put it over here so it goes away.”

Does that make sense?

“The launch was a failure and the root cause is shrouded in mystery. We need a SWOT analysis and at least four graphs a.s.a.p. Does that make sense?”

Of course not. How could it? I once spent five minutes staring at this phrase after I wrote it, and re alized there is no other way to say this. Try to come up with something. You could say “are you breathing in what I’m burnin’?” or “are you picking up what I’m putting down?” but those are just too fun for the corporate world.

Circle back

Possibly the most passive aggressive thing anyone can say to another person. Has anyone every circled back and done something good? We’ll circle back on this one.

What we found...

Oh, you found something? How intriguing. Did the finding find you, or was it always found but merely unseen? Thanks Rumi for the poetic business speak phrases.

The 10,000 foot, helicopter, or tree top view

Do you live the clouds with the care bears? Obviously. And that’s fine.

Let’s take a step back

Translation: I find you so meek and pitiful that I’m willing to be overtly condescending to you in a group setting.

I’m a very visual person

So is everyone. That’s why we have eyeballs. It doesn’t make you special, although you really want to be.

We need to drive growth

Face it - all you can drive is your Kia. Stick to being practical and getting decent gas mileage as I blow past you with my Tesla. Wait, I don’t have a Tesla.

Where the rubber meets the road

Not with your Kia it doesn’t.

What might happen if…

You had an original idea instead of quoting YouTube videos over and over. The universe might implode.

Let’s think expansively

As opposed to being mired in myopia as usual. And then when I think expansively you’ll tell me to be more focused and strategic. How can I win here? Probably by using more business lingo.

Dichotomy

Why is everyone suddenly using this word all the time? Do you have a philosophy degree like me? Are you well versed in Kant’s dialectic? Can you expound on Zeno’s Paradoxes extemporaneously? If not, then stick to woody dicots.

Low hanging fruit

You eat rotten bananas? I hope they’re organic.

I love data

You’re lying. This barely even counts as jargon because there's no effort at all. It's the business speak equivalent of "I love lamp."

In Closing

Business jargon is like a drug; I’m willing to admit I’ve used all of these examples at least once. The irony is that in order to avoid business speak, you need to master it. Sometimes just by owning it and having confidence when you spout business lingo, it comes across as authentic. Or am I talking out of both sides of my mouth (jargon alert)?

Are you fluent in business speak? I’m hoping for some “OMG, I hate that one!” type responses. Which terms or phrases did I miss? Any lingo trending in your office right now?

Be proactive and let me know in the comments, or I’ll circle back.

SWOT Analysis Examples for Amazon with Detailed Templates

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:26:48 GMT

A SWOT analysis is the most well-known strategic framework for mapping your business against the external environment. It's an acronym that lays out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in an organized, interconnected way to provide insight into your current competitive position and where to focus future business efforts.

Have you noticed how most SWOT Analyses are too high level, not brutally honest like they should be, and lack actionable insight? We’ll cover the key issues that make a standard SWOT ineffective, and show you a new approach: a story format technique that addresses these limitations. We'll go in-depth with a SWOT analysis example of Amazon, including its position vs. Wal Mart in a comprehensive video.

Download Three SWOT templates featuring Amazon

When Should You Conduct a SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis is a critical component of the strategic planning process. In the first stage of a situation analysis, you ask "what's happening?" in your business, both internally and externally. Once you've gathered data in your situation analysis using multiple sources and frameworks, distill the critical factors into a SWOT analysis.

Similar to the GOST framework , a SWOT analysis can be done at the corporate, business unit, brand, and product level. You can even use the framework to diagnose what's happening within a specific situation, like a powerful and singular new trend hitting the market. For career development, a SWOT can be a useful personal tool for you to conduct on yourself and your team. Make the tool your own by applying it to your unique needs.

How long does a SWOT take to complete? The quickest way is to sit down for an hour and fill it out yourself, using your mind and any current resources you have. Once you get this raw draft, you can see where you need to explore further to flesh out a polished version. A SWOT can take anywhere from a few minutes to several months to complete depending on how much data you need. If your threats and opportunities are clear and you know what you need to do right away, then your SWOT can be completed much sooner. Remember, it's about actionable impact, not scouring the earth for every little detail or data point.

What Are The Main Limitations of the SWOT Analysis?

Strengths

Strengths are what we believe our business has a dominant position in vs. the competition. They can be anything from brand reputation, customer loyalty measures, technology advantages, speed to market, agility; it's anything you believe you have relative competitive advantage in.

An important note to keep in mind: depending on what you're analyzing with your SWOT, your perceived strengths can actually be a weakness. For instance, Amazon usually has supply chain superiority vs. other organizations. However, going head to head with Walmart in online grocery, Walmart already has physical locations acting as "free" warehouses for all the food it delivers. Amazon can no longer see its durable goods supply chain as a strength in this arena, which is why it needs to consider the acquisition of Whole Foods to adequately compete.

Amazon's Strengths

The Amazon Brand is synonymous with value
Durable goods supply chain
Personalization
Current Prime subscriber base of 150MM members in the US alone

Weaknesses

Weaknesses exist where you lack core competence, but that's not necessarily a negative position. We choose to be weak in certain areas so we can be stronger in others. If a weakness inhibits your ability to compete effectively, that's when you need to note it in this section. If your company is sensitive about using the word weakness, use the word "inhibitors" instead.

Amazon's Weaknesses

The Amazon brand is not synonymous with high quality food
Distribution network is optimized for durable goods not perishables like food
The Amazon Fresh platform is margin prohibitive except in large markets like L.A.

Opportunities

Opportunities come in many flavors. The biggest opportunities arise when many different external factors converge together to offer significant growth for your business. If there's a large and underserved customer segment with an unmet need your company is uniquely positioned to provide, then the stars have aligned. Taking advantage of opportunities often means needing to innovate. Take a look at this article on the SCAMPER framework to help you generate ideas fast >>

Amazon's Opportunity

Online grocery is a $100Bn sector growing at a +15% CAGR over 5 years
Acquiring a current grocery chain, such as Whole Foods , would provide distribution and brand image gains for quality

Threats

Threats are the current and future possibilities that pose an existential challenge to the existence of your business. It's the stuff that keeps you and your CEO up at night. A PESTEL is a great way to lay out the political, economic, societal, technological, environmental, and legal forces that might threaten you. Porter's Five Forces is another staple strategic framework you can use to identify threats.

Amazon's Threats

Walmart has entered online grocery with “ InHome” delivery, an attractive pricing plan, and is gaining share rapidly
Amazon can only win in grocery deliver with a large scale effort , seeking to achieve online delivery market share of 30% by year two in order to be competitive vs. WMT and others

One simple but advanced tip to impress your audience with your SWOT

The real magic behind using a SWOT analysis is discovering ways to turn weaknesses into strengths, and threats into opportunities. When you're able to highlight a significant threat that everyone recognizes is a big deal to your future, and lay out ways you'll transform this threat into an opportunity by reallocating resources to make it a growth driver, you know you've done your job.

If you're willing to invest the extra time, use the SWOT story format to examine each section of your SWOT analysis with a dedicated slide. You could have anywhere from just a few slides to over 20; it all depends on your business needs, and how you want to construct your story. The slide above shows this clearly, you get plenty of dedicated space to allow for clean data visuals and key stats, accompanied by a grey box at the bottom expressing the implications. If you want to go deeper, check out the video below.

Conclusion

Your SWOT Analysis doesn’t have to be amateur. Take the templates we provided using Amazon as an example and craft a professional SWOT right away. Be aware and reduce the limitations of the tool. Grab a white board and map things out with cross functional partners. Check in with them regularly to ensure alignment. Flex your strategic thinking by demonstrating how you minimize threats by transforming them into opportunities. Tailor your approach for your business, hone in on external factors, and consider the new “story format” approach for your next SWOT.

Have you had any success leveraging a SWOT analysis to drive your business?

Will the new story format help you? Let us know, and remember to get the slides here .

SWOT Example of Amazon Entering the Online Grocery Business

You can develop a superior SWOT analysis by identifying the tool's limitations and overcoming them. Standard SWOT analyses end up being internally focused, hold minimal insights/data due to significant space constraints, and often get done in a bubble without cross functional input.

They also end up being a glitzy parade of how strong your company is, with middle managers being timid of listing the true weaknesses of the business. Often, you'll find a lack of external opportunities and threats, because this requires deeper analysis. Recognize these limitations and take steps to minimize them.

Three Steps to A Successful SWOT Analysis

1. Search for the Truth

Remove all bias about your company and the industry you operate in, casting a wide initial net so you don't miss anything
Conduct primary and secondary research to establish a new understanding of your external environment
Start by asking big questions like "what business am I in?", "How have my customers changed?", "Which competitor's are winning and why?"
Ensure you have data in the form of charts and graphs and measurable business goals in order to build an evidence based narrative
A 5Cs analysis is a great way to gather the data you need to inform your SWOT
Learn about 5Cs here >>

2. Get Perspective From Everywhere

Make friends with plenty of colleagues to gain a cross functional view of your business
How does the way your finance team differ from the way your operations team views your business, both internally an externally?
Talk to customers and other external folks like suppliers and consultants who see things you may not
How do the diverse perspectives you've gathered offer new insight into your business challenges?

3. Make it Actionable

Making it actionable means making it focused - you must master the art and science of narrowing your strategic scope so you focus on what matters most and give details on what you can do about it
Use those specific details, such as competitive threats to your customer base and growth goals, and create linkages with pre-existing corporate strategies for smoother alignment
Go from data driven observation to business implications, from there outlining how you'll take steps to address the implications
By turning threats into opportunities, and weaknesses into strengths, you can highlight strategic thinking in your overall approach
You can make your SWOT actionable by using this slide as a shortcut: Take the challenges and opportunities you found in your analysis, note the key resources you'll need to support it, and outline your strategic considerations to drive the business. This slide is in the download link at the beginning of this article.

In Depth & Unexpected Blue Ocean Strategy Examples

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:26:12 GMT

We'll Go Deep with a Blue Ocean Strategy Example Featuring Tesla and Give You 5 More Examples That May Surprise You

We’ll see how Tesla’s model 3 became the best-selling luxury car in the world in 2021, beating the both BMW and Mercedes in sales. You'll get a complete strategy canvas example in excel so you can easily make your own. Download the strategy canvas template (in excel) here>>

We'll review an example showing how Airbnb shook up the value equation in the hotel industry using the Efficiency Frontier framework. You'll even get some unexpected examples, like how the Transformers and Jimi Hendrix created Blue Oceans! There are plenty of cases - if you have some good Red or Blue Ocean examples of your own, we'd love to hear them.

If you know Patrick Bet David, an entrepreneur and influencer, Blue Ocean Strategy ranks number 1 as on his list of 10 must read books – you can check out his list here.

What is Blue Ocean Strategy?

Michael Porter and other strategy experts typically offer an either/or approach to strategy: either pick low cost OR differentiation, but not both. Renee Moauborgne and W. Chan Kim flout this ultimatum in the book, claiming that companies can create uncontested market space and vie for BOTH low cost and differentiation.

In this blue ocean world you’ve created, the competition is irrelevant, because you are competing on different dimensions. You break the value/cost trade off because you are creating unique value and capturing new demand.

The majority of companies, especially heritage brands and organizations, live in a red ocean of rivalry where strategies get copied and become similar, always fighting tooth and nail to eke out competitive advantage to maintain and grow market share.

Blue Oceans Generate Significantly More Relative Profit

Before we look at Tesla, take a peek at this slide demonstrating how despite red ocean products amounting to almost 90% of launches, they only deliver about 40% of profits. That small number (around 10%) of blue ocean products launches amounts to a astonishing 60% of profit. I think you get the take-away.

Creating Blue Oceans Requires Bold Risk Taking

Large organizations capsize in Blue Oceans because:

Blue oceans are often too small to drive enough business at launch (a la the Innovator’s Dilemma )
Blue oceans represent a risk to the short term, as resources and focus get diverted from what you’ve always done (and is proven) to and uncertainty and risky future
Blue oceans products are often a direct threat to your core business. We’ve all heard that Kodak had digital photography technology in the 90’s but said no to it because quality was poor and margins were low. Why cannibalize a strong traditional business by creating less profitable competition for yourself?

The list goes on and on.

Blue Ocean Strategy Example of Tesla

Elon Musk looked at the luxury car space and noticed it was ripe for disruption. His passion for engineering technology, and the fact that he's rich and people know he'll innovate where others don’t dare, allowed him to envision a new landscape for automobiles.

The introduction of the Model 3 gave Tesla yet another superior electric vehicle at a price point under $40k that appeals to the masses.

As you see from the strategy canvas I put together below, Tesla makes incredibly bold strategic trade-offs in order to win. Tesla is willing to be weak in areas that were previously table stakes in order to excel across new dimensions.

Weak Areas (CONS):

Tesla doesn’t spend on advertising in any way close to the big players
Tesla doesn’t even have build quality or an interior on par with Lexus or Mercedes, it’s simply “good enough” to be a luxury car
Tesla went CRAZY and said NO to dealerships. Who else could do this???

Parity:

Tesla is about the same in terms of its ride and design. Sure, Tesla has quirky features like a whoopie cushion sound in some of its seats and a nifty executive table in the back seat as an option, but it’s the technology, not necessarily aesthetic design that Tesla competes on.

Break Out Superiority (PROS):

This is the blue ocean territory. No one rivals Tesla on environmental impact, fuel cost, technology (think self-driving cars you can buy NOW), and their expansive charging station network.

But will the calm seas last forever?

Tesla stock is up +19,000% since its IPO due to the blue ocean it created for itself. But Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, and BMW are introducing electric cars to compete, and the blue ocean will inevitably turn ruddy in no time.

The Competition is Catching Up

The strategy canvas below, orange line, shows where the luxury market may be in 2025. It’s much, much closer to Tesla, eroding their differentiated stance.

With this threat in mind, Elon Musk purchased a solar panel company and poured incredible resources into R&D to make its solar technology superior by significant orders of magnitude. Tesla is beginning to seem less like a car dealer and more like an energy technology company.

Example of How Airbnb Found it's Blue Ocean Using the Efficiency Frontier

The Strategy Canvas isn't the only way to conceive of and map out Blue Oceans. The Efficiency Frontier is a great way to stay hyper focused on your two key attributes of competition. In this example of Airbnb vs the hotel industry, including luxury players like the Ritz and budget options like Motel 6, you see Airbnb winning by delivering both superior value and costing less - the hallmark of a true Blue Ocean.

The further you push out the value/cost curve, the more transformational your business is and the bluer your ocean becomes. You can get this Efficiency Frontier slide and 90 of our other templates here >>

More Blue Ocean Strategy Examples:

Transformers, Jimi Hendrix, Swiffer, and Kizik Shoes

Jimi Hendrix Breaks the Sound Barrier in the 60s

Everything about Jimi Hendrix was different, making him the ultimate guitar hero who went platinum many times over. He used a right handed Fender guitar and had it strung backwards making the mental thrust behind everything he did quite unique. Guitar amps weren't even capable of handling his prowess and personalized sound until the 1960s, audiences wouldn't have been ready for his trademark sound until the experimental ethos of the 60s became pervasive.

His rhythm guitar and innovative use of pedal effects to create controlled distortion provided an electrifying sound of breakout superiority that impacts guitarists to this day. When you have something different that people can't get enough of for decades, you're in a Blue Ocean.

How Optimus Prime Transformed the Toy Industry

Plenty of memorable brands like He-man, Thundercats, Rainbow Bright, and Cabbage Patch kids were born in the 1980s. But what intellectual property has truly stood the test of time, spawning

blockbuster movies (hugely successful even if you're not a fan), comic books, and of course the toys? The answer is Transformers, led by the venerable Optimus Prime.

What could be a redder ocean than toys? Shelves in absolute disarray with action figures and dolls flung everywhere, screaming kids scratching and crawling; it's almost impossible to break through the noise. But Transformers did. Hasbro invented a toy (in partnership with Takara of Japan) that's really two toys (and akin to twice the value) in one: Optimus prime was a robot AND a truck. Combine this unique way to play with a toy with and incredible story, which was developed by Marvel, and you get serious breakout superiority.

More often than not, especially in industries like fashion and toys, you get "trend oceans" that seem like Blue Oceans but really aren't. Cabbage Patch kids didn't have evergreen staying power. The abominable stylings of Van Dutch, with Paris Hilton as poster child, was red hot for a few months but was merely built on trend and debauched brand ambassadors, nothing fundamentally different.

The way Transformers has been able to remain relevant, and protected its ocean waters, is through constant reinvention. The toys, and story, have changed a lot since the 1980s while still remaining true to the core (except that Optimus Prime actually kills Decepticons in the movie, which is inexplicably off brand). The next Transformers movie, Rise of the Beasts , is due out in 2023.

How Kizik Shoes Fit Better Than the Competition During the Pandemic

In the 80's and early 90s, sneaker brands fiercely battled over performance. First came Nike Air to help you jump like Jordan. Reebok responded with "pumps" that let you control how much air you poofed into your shoes, with Shaq front and center. Late to the game, Converse showed up with "React Juice," a liquid that would swing from side to side to provide better stability and support during intense activity. Only uncool kids had the Converse waterbed shoes with React Juice, and I was sadly one of them.

During the pandemic, a lot of office workers were sent home to start a new kind of slovenly lifestyle. The beginning of the pandemic in 2020 was rough on everyone; I remember people complaining about having to shower and get ready in the morning. Even putting your shoes on, if no one was even going to see you, was too strenuous of a task. Thus came Kizik.

No need to untie your shoes in order to swoop your feet in. Kizik's are designed to have you just plop your feet right in. I went from untying both my dress shoes, putting them on with a shoe horn, then tying them, to just flying right in. For a certain segment of the market that are hyper conscious of convenience and efficiency (lazy people), Kiziks are in a league all their own.

Can they maintain their breakout superiority? Kiziks are an incredibly practical shoe, but it's difficult to say what their brand stands for. Nike seems to consistently filter its Blue Ocean waters by working with new athletes, moving into new sports, innovating with new technology, and crafting a brand image that people want to wear. Kizik is just functional. Their function can easily be copied. Let's see where they end up in a year or two.

How Swiffer Mopped the Floor with Old Fashioned Alternatives

Procter & Gamble is one of the best companies on the planet in terms of quality and innovation, especially given it's hulking size as a multi-billion dollar firm. They take the most boring, tired, antiseptic categories and brands and turn them into something special. Oil of Olay was a stagnant brand until CEO A.G. Lafley made the bold move to increase it's price and give it department store quality formulas available at your local CVS - now it's beating out L'Oreal. Old Spice was older than your grandpa, and they revved it up with some of the most hilarious, and absurd, ads we've ever seen.

Before the Swiffer, and it's clones, arrived on the scene, you probably used a mop, broom, or vacuum to clean the kitchen floor. That's a lot of work and instruments to wield. A mop requires the uses of a sloshy bucket with rank water in it to be hauled form room to room while splashing on your leg. Everyone thought this was the way it had always been, and the way that it would always be. The Swiffer folks at Procter & Gamble thought otherwise. As consumer experts, they identified pain points and revealed the unmet need for something easy to use that combined the cleaning power of a mop and a broom. Thus the elegant Swiffer was born.

Not only does the Swiffer manage the job of a broom and mop, weighs almost nothing, and cleans your house with a variety of pleasant scents, it has a razor blade type replenishment model that keeps consumers buying wet cloth refills at high margins. If you compare the cost of a Swiffer vs. a mop and a broom, the Swiffer is FAR costlier. But it reduced the pain of hauling around a bucket, it's lights as a feather, and it gets the job done beautifully. Sure, you can't sop up the entire bottle of grape juice that Timmy spills, but the trade off is well worth it for most.

Conclusion

We hope these Blue Ocean strategy examples help you understand the need to be bold, take risks, accept trade-offs, and reinvent continuously in order to sustain your success. If you want to go even more in depth with the examples we shared, try filling out the Strategy Canvas we have available on your own.

Do you think Tesla will fall victim to competitor’s red ocean strategy against it, or will they unlock incredible demand in other sectors, like solar, to navigate their business to new Blue Oceans?

"There's magic in the water that draws all men away from the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea."

- Herman Melville, probably talking about the allure of blue ocean strategy

Defining Business Strategy in Simple Terms (So You Understand What 95% of Your Co-workers Don't)

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:25:44 GMT

According to an article from Robert Kaplan from the Harvard Business Review, 95% of employees are unaware of, or don’t understand their company’s strategy ( source ).

Does this statistic surprise you? I once asked a colleague who had had the word “strategist” in their title how they defined strategy. The response was “can I get back to you on that?” This person is not an example of a low performing employee, it's an example of the norm.

We’ll cover why business strategy is difficult to grasp by reviewing prominent definitions from BCG and Peter Drucker. We'll examine why standard definitions don’t get us very far on our journey to become better at strategy. Next we’ll cover McKinsey’s view on strategy, which points us in the right direction. We'll share our own simple definition of strategy, and end with an example featuring Southwest that demonstrates the strategic mindset in action.

The Meaning and Importance of Defining Business Strategy

The reason you should care about defining your business strategy is because you have finite resources. If we had unlimited capital, we could invest everywhere, and beat the competition everywhere. But given limited resources, especially in the early stages of a start-up or for bootstrapped brands and products, the only way to arrive at competitive advantage is by leveraging your resources exceptionally well.

The caveat to this article is there is no true catch all definition of strategy. You must juggle opposing ways of thinking, being philosophical, open, and specific all at the same time. Fundamentally, there is strategy creation and strategy execution, and these are two very different things.

For strategy creation, You need to think and breathe strategically in all that you do, and we'll cover more about that soon. Franklin Covey's Book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has chapter 2 dedicated to "thinking with the end in mind." Strategy is about long term viability, and having a strategy vision is critical. By thinking with the end in mind, you'll be goal oriented, focused on a vision for the future that will shape what winning looks like. Once you have a vision for what winning looks like, you can work backwards and develop your competitive advantage. You'll understand what you don't understand, and ask questions about your customers, market, and competition to begin allocating your scarce resources towards honing a unique competitive advantage that delivers strategic value no one else can.

The way you execute your strategy is called strategic planning. Once you have a strategy, you need to put it into a plan of action so you can achieve your vision and goals.

Key components of strategic planning include:

Interlocking with corporate strategy and organizational objectives: You need to make sure your new strategic makes sense holistically for your company, and that key stakeholders "get it" and have by in.
Setting a budget, goals, objectives, and KPIs: What gets measured gets done, and you'll need to ensure the new strategy can achieve the financial results you demand while staying within budget.
Coordinating and reinforcing your investments and resources towards your objectives: One of the best buzzwords is "multiplier effect" or "network effect" - if you can find synergies in your business that come together to multiply the effect of what you do and what you invest, you need to find them.
Communication: Don't let your strategy become an ancient text no one remembers except vaguely as an oral tradition; get it down on paper and ask people from the board room all the way to the break room where the ship is head, and make sure they know.

For a better sense of how to develop a strategic plan and framework, check out our post on the GOST model of Goals, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics>>

Why is Business Strategy So Troublesome to Grasp?

From personal experience, I would say the main culprits are the following:

Embarrassment: You and I would both be ashamed to admit we don’t know what strategy is all about.
Most business positions don’t care about strategy: Sure, every role purports to desire a “strategic thinker,” but the inevitable demands of day-to-day needs put strategy by the wayside. Many people think strategy belongs at the CEO level, not in their entry level or middle manager world.

In addition to the above, getting a sound apprehension of strategy is no easy feat. It requires a lot of that deep, energy sapping System 2 thinking that Daniel Kahneman described in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow . Abstruse definitions abound, but they don’t help us much either.

The above definitions get us part of the way by mentioning goals, competitive advantage, choosing activities differently than rivals, but their abstract nature leaves us wanting. The Drucker definition below brings us a bit further, but does strategy HAVE to be long term? I enjoyed reading Drucker's "Managing for Results" and "Innovation and Entrepreneurship," and he certainly “gets” strategy more than I ever will, but even his definition falls short of providing a solid mental image of what strategy truly is.

Peter Drucker’s definition of strategy: “A pattern of activities that seek to achieve the objectives of the organization and adapt its scope, resources and operations to environmental changes in the long term.”

McKinsey points us on the right track for understanding strategy…

The big take away – strategy is a mindset, not the memorization of definitions, processes, or fancy frameworks. Which is too bad, because this blog and website are all about fancy frameworks. I digress.

Strategy as a mindset makes sense. You could call Da Vinci one of the greatest strategic thinkers of all time, even though he never even had an internship at McKinsey or BCG, because he was an astounding observer with a clear goal of understanding why things exist and appear as they do. He implemented his observations and conclusions into his work in a very strategic way.

As a quick aside, I want to share an article I just read from an old friend (and my old boss) Jake Dunlap over at SKALED. Jake looks at annual reports to examine company strategies and corporate priorities; it's a great way to see how your competition is building their strategy to ensure you're differentiated from the pack. Read the article here >>

So What Is a “Strategic Way” of Thinking and Doing Things?

Ok we've admitted no definition will get you very far. However, the Strategy Kiln definition below aims to define strategy in simple terms you can take with you and use every day.

Our definition is about honing in on the critical factors of the situation, making a choice to focus on these critical factors, and making connections where possible to drive increased results, e.g. create multiplier effects. An important note: our definition is phrased as a question. The only way to get to the critical factors of a situation is to ask the right questions. You MUST be curious and analytical. Ask 5 whys. Many of the best strategies are developed by asking simple questions like "how might I solve this problem for my customers without increasing prices?" or even more simply asking "what's happening?"

If you want to learn more about the strategic thinker’ s mindset, checkout my video on “OCCAM’s Strategy Razor” . It provides an in depth analysis and framework for strategic thinking.

Here’s a quick example of strategy from a day to day perspective

Let’s say you’re a marketing coordinator for Southwest Airlines and your boss asks you to recommend some tactics to drive awareness around the new Southwest credit card benefits, keeping in mind that a major challenge is that customers find the credit card pitches in flight very boring. You could come up with a stand-alone tactical plan and it might be fine.

But if you opened up and asked “what’s happening” in other areas of the organization, you may find some interesting opportunities. Perhaps the CEO or your marketing VP recently mentioned they want Southwest employees to come to life in advertising. This might lead you to search on YouTube, where you find a viral video you saw on YouTube about a really funny Southwest Flight Attendant who the passengers loved, garnering 100MM views.

Perhaps you could propose including that employee in assets where you try to make the credit card benefits fun and enjoyable. You might even reach out to the PR team to find out they are already creating assets you can use for your campaign, driving synergy among departments.

This would be a great story…

The stand out part of this strategic approach would be how you addressed the challenge of boring credit card pitches, brought a Southwest employee to life in creative assets, and how you created connections with other departments to drive cost savings and synergy in the development of a winning campaign. You got to the core of the challenge and implemented reinforcing strategic action to drive results. Someone would probably honor you with a shiny gift card for your stellar strategic efforts.

Conclusion

Hopefully, we've defined strategy in a way that clarifies how to use the elusive “S” word. Although the word strategy has been abused and lost much of its meaning, in a way similar to the infamous phrase “proactive approach,” we can’t stop using the word. You don't have to be Michael Porter, you can get to the heart of strategy by asking questions. You can get to the heart of competitive advantage by asking questions, too. Don't be afraid to create your own simple definition of strategy, and print out ours and tack it on your cubicle or wall of your glorious office. Let’s continue to learn and grow our strategic mindset together.

What’s your favorite definition of strategy?

How would you describe what strategy is?

Remember to check out my video on “OCCAM’s Strategy Razor” for more information on strategic thinking.

What is Strategic Thinking? Learn to Think and Act Strategically with OCCAM’s Strategy Razor

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:24:43 GMT

Here's the OCCAM framework put together in a way that shows you the components of strategic thinking and how strategic leadership and strategic planning fit it .

Do you have a cohesive view of what strategic thinking really is? Personally, I didn’t, so I decided to map it out. The OCCAM Strategy Framework we’ll look at illustrates the tools, traits, and behaviors I’ve identified as critical, all on one page. You can download the slides here.

Cultivating a Strategic Mindset

Getting to the heart of strategy without “faking it” is a tall order. It’s more about a strategic thinking process vs. memorizing definitions.

The “S” word (Strategy, in case you’re not following) is often misused and abused. Before we get into OCCAM, you need to be able to define, or at least conceptualize, strategy in some capacity. It’s not so simple. Ask ten different people and you’ll get ten different answers.

Check out this blog post “What the Heck is Business Strategy? 95% of Employees Don’t Know” for some definitions of strategy. The ultimate conclusion of this post is that strategy is a mindset.

How Do You Develop Strategic Thinking?

Let’s find out.

In a similar fashion to the O-O-D-A framework used in aviation, the O-C-C-A-M Strategy Razor seeks to create an orientation of where you are, what’s happening, and how you need to make choices and act.

The five-letter acronym spells out Open, Compress, Coordinate, Activate, and Measure.

Notice that each letter of O-C-C-A-M is accompanied by a strategic question:

Open: What’s happening?
Compress: What are the critical success factors?
Coordinate: What are the Synergies?
Activate: Will my plan deliver my objectives?
Measure: How can we improve?

Asking questions is the number one behavior you need to habituate in order become strategic.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you have a sense of what strategic thinking looks like, and are able to define it by internalizing this framework.

Being strategic is about having the right mindset. You can build this mindset by asking the right questions and applying the OCCAM Strategy Razor.

The OCCAM Strategy Razor puts strategic thinking on a page, but at the end of the day, strategic thinking is less about following guidelines and more about adjusting your mentality.

Can you pause the day-to-day grind to connect the dots and think bigger picture?
Can you see the forest for the trees?
Once you gain the perspective you need, do you know how to actually do something about it?
Strategy is not linear. You can use OCCAM to identify critical factors, but you expansive thinking to figure out how to choose the right actions and develop a winning strategy. Keep asking questions to develop your mental strategic muscle.
Asking 5 Whys sounds cliché, but it remains perhaps the greatest approach to see what others don’t and uncovering strategic insight.

Remember...

Has this post provided any value to help you grow strategic thinking skills?

Do you have any strategic thinking examples or skills you would like to share?

7 Things to Consider While Hiring a Strategy Consulting Firm

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:22:34 GMT

The business world is constantly changing and evolving. To stay competitive, you need to always think of new ways to innovate and grow your company. Hiring a strategy consulting firm can help with this immensely. Strategy consulting firms are experts in the industry, have strong networks that can maximize your potential for success, and work hard to develop an effective plan for your organization's future.

Here are some tips on how you should go about hiring one:

1. Understand the difference between strategy consulting and management consulting.

While most organizations think that strategy consulting and management consulting are the same, in reality, they can be very different. Strategy consulting focuses on how to develop your business strategy, inclusive of business model innovation and development of new processes and systems, while management consulting is more about optimizing existing strategies, operations, cost efficiencies, and analyzing current statistics. Understanding the difference between these two can help you determine which consultant would be best for your needs.

2. What is their approach towards problem-solving?

Do they have a collaborative style, or do they like to work independently? What are some specific examples of what kind of problems did clients ask them for help with? These details will give you an idea of if their style meshes well with your culture.

3. What do they look for in a candidate or company to take on as a client?

These details can give you an idea of their approach to taking on companies with different levels of maturity and growth. This will help you better assess if it's a good fit for your brand, too.

4. Are they willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement?

You'll want to keep your strategies confidential, even from other departments such as marketing and sales. You don't want anyone getting a jump start on how you're going to enter the market or how you're looking at things. This is important because you don't want your ideas to be shared with your competitors either.

5. Where can you find their work?

By asking to see samples of the work they've done in the past, that will give you a better sense of how much experience they have working on these kinds of projects. If it's good quality work, then their experience level is likely going to be quite similar.

6. Have they worked in the same industry as yours?

Check out their portfolio of clients and see if any are in a similar industry as yours. The more you know about the companies they're working with and what challenges they've faced, the better idea you'll have of what kind of value proposition your firm can provide. If they specialize in this area, you know right off the bat they'll be knowledgeable on handling any challenges that arise during the process.

7. How much are they going to cost you?

With many companies unable to afford the cost of hiring in-house employees, they instead turn to consultants. But it can be difficult for a company with limited resources and budget constraints when deciding which consulting firm to hire. To find one that will provide you services at an affordable rate while also ensuring quality service is delivered, make sure your new consultant’s fee structure includes reasonable costs upfront and items such as staff support fees or monthly minimum hours.

Remember, when evaluating a strategy consulting firm, it's important to make sure that their expertise matches your growth and development goals. Choosing the right one will spare you some headaches and help you reach your business goals faster.

We hope you found our blog post helpful and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you hire a strategy consulting firm, consider these seven points!

5 Diverse Strategic Management Consultants You Should Know About

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:19:01 GMT

Believe it or not, not everyone is as into strategic management as those of us here at Strategy Kiln (we’re shocked too). However, we think that once you start learning about it, you’ll be hooked.

There are pretty much endless ways that a business can structure its strategy, depending on its goals, values, budget, and positioning. Successful strategy is as much art as science. You have to understand the data—but you also have to understand the trends that are driving the data. You have to implement new systems—but you also have to be sensitive to how changes will be received.

There’s a lot to learn, and we think it’s fascinating.

But where do you go when you want to geek out on strategic management?

There are so many influencers, authorities, and experts coming at strategic management from such a wide variety of angles that it’s not always easy to know where to start. That’s why we’ve put together a short list of strategic management consultants who represent a spectrum of expertise, skills, and background and who regularly share their thoughts about strategy consulting on blogs, LinkedIn, and elsewhere.

This is not a list with Peter Drucker or Michael Porter. Yes, those guys are a couple of my favorite strategists but you likely already know about them. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a great place to start for some fresh perspective on management consulting.. In no particular order, we present…

5 Strategic Consultants You should start following today!

Michelle Silverthorn

Founder and CEO

Inclusion Nation

Founder and CEO of Inclusion Nation, a diversity solutions company, Michelle works with organizations around the country to create workspaces centered on equity, belonging, and authenticity. Her blog and LinkedIn are two good places to read her thoughts on making the future of work more diverse and equitable.

A TEDx speaker and author of the forthcoming book, Authentic Diversity: How To Change The Workplace For Good , Michelle is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Michigan Law School.

Follow Michelle on LinkedIn

Jay G. Cone

Co-Founder

Unstuck Minds

Maybe it’s his bachelor’s degree in philosophy that gives Jay Cone his unique perspective. Co-founder of Unstuck Minds, a consulting service with a mission to “ help people think better and connect better so the world becomes more creative and compassionate,” Jay blogs regularly about strategy and strategic thinking, leadership, self-awareness, and more.

Jay is the author of The Surprising Power of Not Knowing What to Do; Discovering Creativity and Compassion in a Time of Chaos , and a former adjunct faculty member in the Executive MBA program at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he taught Building Effective Teams.

In addition to his BA in Philosophy from U.C.L.A., Jay has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Dallas and a PhD in Organizational Systems from Saybrook University.

Follow Jay on LinkedIn

Madelyn Sklar

Founder and Social Media Consultant

Madelyn Sklar

If you want to know more about the intersection of social media and strategic management, Madelyn Sklar is the consultant to follow. With 17 years of social media marketing and 26 years of digital marketing experience, she has the ideal skills and background to help companies take charge of their social media platforms and get results with new fans and followers.

She shares immediate, actionable advice on her blog and podcast . Not surprisingly, she also makes great use of social media, regularly posting on Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn, and YouTube . Check out her weekly Twitter Chats with other strategists, coaches, and influencers.

Madelyn has been named one of 50 Must-Follow Women Entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post, one of 50 Incredible Women in Marketing to Follow by Search Engine Journal and ranked the #1 Social Media Power Influencer in Houston.

Follow Madelyn on LinkedIn

Flo Falayi

Associate Client Partner

Korn Ferry

Born in the US, raised in Nigeria, and educated in Britain, Flo Falayi has a unique perspective on culture, leadership excellence, business success, and change. As an Associate Client Partner at Korn Ferry, he serves as a strategic advisor and coach to executives, leaders, senior leadership teams, and organizations. His focus is on leadership Development, Executive Coaching, and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

He regularly posts on LinkedIn , offering perspectives on leadership, mindset, motivation, and designing a more inclusive workplace. You can read more on his personal blog . Flo has a bachelor’s of arts in architecture from the University of Ife, a bachelor’s of science in computer information systems from Illinois State University, a master’s degree in information systems from Keller Graduate School, and a PhD in organizational leadership from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Jermaine Moore

Founder and Principal Consultant

Mars Hill Group

Founder of the Mars Hill Group a consulting practice, Jermaine Moore leads a small team that helps companies define their culture, introducing and reinforcing skills and behaviors that drive business results and team performance. His areas of expertise include DEI, culture, leadership, team development, and coaching. Don’t miss his thought-provoking posts on LinkedIn .

Jermaine also volunteers as the Diversity Director for the Human Resources State Council of NH, serves on the board of the Diversity Workforce Coalition, and as a Trustee for Berwick Academy.

Follow Jermaine on LinkedIn

Mark Ferreira serves as the CTO and Resident Archimedes at Strategy Kiln, bringing over 15 years of IT experience across healthcare, retail and manufacturing sectors. With technical and managerial expertise as both a trainer and technical analyst, Mark specializes in optimizing workflows and implementing innovative technology solutions to help clients drive digital transformation. He inspires teams to push boundaries, oversees the development of client-centric strategies and leads transformative tech initiatives that establish the company as a leader in delivering practical, growth-driven solutions.

strategy-kiln

B2B Market Segmentation: Expert Insights and Case Studies

How to Think About B2B Segmentation ﻿

Expert Perspectives on B2B Segmentation

How to Develop Criteria to Evaluate Your Market Segments

The B2B Segmentation Process (“Laddering” from Macro to Micro)

Common Challenges in B2B Segmentation (and How Firms Overcome Them)

B2B Segmentation in Action: Notable Examples

An in Depth Look: The B2B CRM Market and Customer Segmentation

Choosing a Customer Target & Creating a Profile

Why B2B Segmentation Matters More Than Ever

B2B vs B2C Segmentation – Key Differences

LinkedIn Ads Targeting: How B2B Teams Reach the Right Buyers

Why LinkedIn targeting feels confusing (and why it matters)

The real risk, spending money on the wrong audience

What good targeting on LinkedIn looks like

The LinkedIn targeting options you should understand first

Locations and language, common “gotchas”

Company industry and company size

Job function and seniority vs. job title

Skills, interests, and groups

Advanced Linkedin Ads Targeting: Testing Audience Combos

Matched Audiences, the most underrated targeting tool

Matched Audiences, the most underrated targeting tool

Contact list uploads

Retargeting audiences

Predictive audiences and when to test them

Common targeting mistakes that waste budget

Finding the right balance: not too small, not too broad

Exclusions

Layering too many filters

Optimizing too early

Quick checklist for LinkedIn Ads targeting

Bringing it all together: a smarter approach to LinkedIn Ads targeting

If you want a second set of eyes

Mastering LinkedIn Hooks: An In Depth Look at How B2B Thought Leaders Stop the Scroll

What Is a “Hook” and Why Does It Matter?

Classic Hook - Writing Wisdom from the Copywriting Masters

The Psychology Behind Effective Hooks (Curiosity, Emotion, and Value)

The STEPPS Framework: Why We Share (and How It Informs Hooks)

How to Use Hooks on LinkedIn: Strategies for Different Content Types

Hooks in Text Posts (Feed Updates)

Hooks in Image Posts and Carousels

Hooks in LinkedIn Videos

How Top LinkedIn Influencers Use Hooks (Examples & Tactics)

Beyond Clickbait: Delivering Value After the Hook

Strategies vs. Tactics: What They Are, How they're Different & Connected, & Why You Should Care

How Strategy Fits in with Strategic Planning

The Components of Strategies and Tactics

Elements of a Strategy

Strategy Pressure Test: The key to getting strategies right

Elements of Tactics

Why are tactics mistaken for strategies?

A simple example of strategies and tactics

How Are Strategies and Tactics Different Yet Related?

“Where” Strategy

“How” Strategy

How to Connect Strategies and Tactics Together?

Conclusion: What Understanding Strategy & Tactics Means for You

An Easy Paid Per Click Audit Strategy: Four Simple yet Powerful Questions to Ask Your Agency

Maximizing PPC Success: Avoiding the Pitfalls of the ‘Set-it-and-forget-it’ Approach

Don’t Blame the PPC Agency – Teach Yourself the Basics So You Can Drive Results

The ROI for Google Paid Per Click /Search Engine Marketing Ads is There

Maximizing PPC Success: Avoiding the Pitfalls of the ‘Set-it-and-forget-it’ Approach

Four Simple but Powerful Questions to Ask Your SEM Agency

Technical Questions To Get Comfortable Asking in a PPC Audit

Ask your agency what your main KPIs are according to them - you'll want to align sharply on these.

Going Even Deeper

Another Critical Area to Optimize: Negative Keywords

A/B testing

Conclusion: Take Action and Review Your Google Ads Account Yourself or With Your Agency

Is a Fractional CMO Worth It? The Answer with a Pros and Cons Force-Field Analysis

What is a fractional CMO in simple terms?

What business problem does a fractional CMO solve?

How many hours does a fractional CMO work?

How much does a fractional CMO cost?

How to ensure a good fit when hiring a fractional CMO

Fractional CMO services and responsibilities include:

Five Pros and Five Cons of Fractional CMOs

Pros of Hiring a Fractional CMO:

How to Think About B2B Segmentation