Have you ever seen those dudes walking around with massive arm muscles and skinny legs? They work out hardcore, but they skip leg day.

The same thing happens in business.

There is an old business concept that I apply to every piece of business I work on. It goes like this: “In the absence of strategy, activity fills the void.”

In marketing language, that translates to a simple and destructive idea.

It means, when you don’t have a plan for your marketing, you end up doing a lot of random tactics that are disjointed. The failure to connect tactics around a single audience or business objective is the number one challenge we encounter at FSM – hands down (and it’s not even close).

The marketing and business effectiveness that is realized once all of a business’s marketing activities are coordinated and purposeful is essential and often surprising.

To find these opportunities in your own marketing, examine a couple of your tactics and see if you can find ways they are connected and working toward the same goal.

A common set of tactics that exist in separate silos are search marketing efforts and social marketing efforts.

First, why do these tactics end up disconnected?

In a world of constantly evolving and often brand new marketing and communications channels, the specialist wins out. That means that marketers are more focused on finding a specialist who can execute an idea well within a particular channel, like Facebook, than they are in understanding reaching their customer.

So, you have a person or agency (or both) that works on search. And you have a different person or agency (or both) that works on social.

Not only is an abundance of vendors tough to manage (I used to do this when I was on the client side, and it’s a lot of keep up with), it’s hard to harmonize and coordinate the effectiveness of both campaigns around the customer and desired audience.

And that’s the whole point!

The truth is, Google or Facebook… all of that stuff is just software. It’s much harder to find ways to reach and activate an audience than it is to be effective with software.

A recent study from Marin Software showed that people who clicked on both your search ad and your social ad are twice as likely to buy.

That tells me 2 things.

First, be in search and social as a channel. They are 2 essential channels.

The approach is slightly different… search ads are written different than social. For search, you’re waiting for them to ask for your service. On social you’re presenting your service to them as an interruption in their timeline. So, it’s important to approach folks smartly.

Second, if you’re doing your conversion funnel right, impressions (or reach) is rightfully atop your funnel. The more channels you can afford to be in, the more exposure is happening to fill the top of your funnel. Once your ads are getting clicked on, then it’s about optimizing the lower parts of the funnel (your landing page, your form, your thank you page, your follow up, etc.).

The last, and possibly most important bit of data from the study, people that clicked on both ads actually spent more money than the average buyer.

It’s important for your business to be in both channels with ads. Not only is your top-of-mind awareness increasing, your average sale is, too, when the ads get clicked on.

Online marketing is an area where you should be spending a larger percentage of your budget. Failing to do so creates an area of opportunity for your competition!