I've read a few articles recently about how much of your time you should be spending on various marketing activities.

The problem with those types of articles is that inevitably, you're going to spend most of your time on tactics.

Tactics are what you do day in, day out. If you go to one networking event a week for example then over a year you're inevitably going to spend much more time networking than you spent on your marketing strategy. Even though the marketing strategy is by far the more important of the two activities.

So instead of focusing on the amount of time doing various activities, I've started focusing more on how much of my brain power is going into them.

Even though a networker will spend more time on networking than strategy, they should spend much more of their brain power on strategy.

A rough rule of thumb is that you should be spending about a third of your brain power on understanding your clients and what they want. About a third on strategy (ie deciding how to respond to what clients want: who to target, how to position your offers). And about a third on the tactics.

You'll spend way more time implementing the tactics. But your brainpower needs to focus on building deep understanding of what your potential clients really want, which of them you're going to focus on, what you're going to offer them, and what you're going to emphasise in your marketing.

So many people jump straight to the tactics. But if you get the strategy right the tactics become much more straightforward.

A simple example is Facebook Ads.

They have a ton of targeting options. But if you haven't put deep thought into who you're going to target and what they're focused on then you end up with the same generic targeting that everyone else in your field uses.

Which means you're all bidding for the same interests and your ads all look the same. Up go your ad costs and down go your conversions.

More thought up front lets you target more intelligently and have ads that really resonate. Down go your ad costs and up go your conversions.

Not because you're somehow a Facebook Ads master now. But because you've put your brainpower into strategy.

In fact, if your marketing is becoming a bit of a grind and losing its effectiveness then rather than jump to another tactic it's usually best to go back and examine your strategy. Revisit your understanding of client needs, your targeting and your offer.

It'll have a much bigger impact than just hopping on to a new shiny tactic.