Strategy Before Tactics

Goal, audience, message, channel, measure: one page that tells you whether anything you do can be judged.

Every honky tonk has a drawer, a shelf, or a corner of someone’s head where good ideas go to pile up. Run a trivia night. Start a text club. Book the band everybody’s talking about. Film the bartender making the drink with the smoke on it. None of these is a bad idea, and that’s the trouble: when everything is a decent idea, you do them all halfway, none of them gets a fair test, and at the end of the quarter you can’t say which one helped. The calendar is full and the room is about where it was.

What’s missing is almost never another idea. It’s a reason, written down before the work starts, that says what this particular effort is supposed to change, for whom, and how you’ll know. Public relations people call that a strategy, and the word makes it sound bigger than it is. For a small room it can fit on one page and take twenty minutes. Volumes One through Five were full of tactics. This chapter is the page they were supposed to hang from.

You’ll use the page in this chapter for the rest of the book. It runs in five steps: goal, audience, message, channel, measure. It’s the plan Chapter 21 said was missing from most small-business measurement, and it’s the form Chapter 36 stacks into an annual plan. We’ll also file four tactics from Volumes Four and Five here, since each one is a way of making a strategic choice before spending a dollar or an hour: choosing the goal, picturing the audience, picking the style of night, and reading the groups in the room.

PR TACTIC: The One-Line Test

What it is: Before you start any effort, finish one sentence: “We are doing this so that [who] will [do what] by [when], and we’ll know because [number].”

Why it works: If you can’t finish the sentence, the effort can’t be judged later, and an effort that can’t be judged can’t be improved.

Try this: Finish the sentence for the one thing you’re working on right now, and cross out anything that doesn’t fit on the line.

4.1 Why Strategy Comes First

A tactic is a thing you do: a post, a flyer, a discount, a press pitch, a new Thursday. A strategy is the reason you picked that thing over the others. In the working world of PR, planning models almost always run in the same order, even when they use different names: research the situation, set objectives, decide who you’re trying to reach and what you want to say, choose tactics, carry them out, and evaluate. The sequence matters more than the labels. The point is that evaluation is built into step one, because an objective you can’t check later isn’t an objective yet. It’s a hope with a deadline. Small rooms don’t need the full formal version of these models. They need the habit underneath them: decide what you want to change, decide how you’ll know, and only then decide what to do. Everything else in a planning model is a way of making sure those three questions get answered before money is spent.

Small rooms skip the order for understandable reasons. The owner is also the cook, the booker, and the plumber of last resort. Strategy feels like the thing consultants do in conference rooms. But the cost of skipping it shows up in a specific way: you can’t tell a good tactic that was poorly timed from a bad tactic, because you never wrote down what you were trying to do. A flyer campaign that brought forty people to a Tuesday looks like a success if the aim was forty people and a failure if the aim was to build a Tuesday regular base, since flyers rarely do that alone. Same event, opposite verdicts, depending on a sentence nobody wrote. This is why a strategy sentence saves arguments. When the bartender wants to try video, the teacher wants a second beginner night, and the owner wants a radio spot, the question isn’t whose idea is best. It’s which idea serves the goal on the page. If none of them does, the goal or the ideas need work, and that conversation is more useful than a vote.

There’s a second reason, and it’s the one most owners feel in their budget. Without a goal, the loudest option wins. The salesperson with the best pitch, the platform with the most notifications, the friend who’s sure a certain thing worked for her cousin’s bar. A written goal is a filter. It lets you say “that’s a good idea for a different goal” and move on without guilt. Volume Four called this the Primary Goal Filter: choose the main outcome before choosing platforms or content. It was written for bartender-creators, but the idea is the same for a room, an act, or a class. Everything that doesn’t serve the stated goal waits. Saying no to good ideas is the hardest part. Keep a list of them on the back of the page, with the date, so nobody feels their idea was thrown away. Most of them will still be good next quarter, and some will fit a later goal better than this one.

4.2 The Five Steps on One Page

Step one is the goal, and it has to be a change in the world, not an activity. “Post more” is an activity. “Get twenty more people to try our Tuesday lesson night by the end of the quarter” is a change. A good goal names a number or at least a direction you could check, a time frame, and one stage of the Chapter 3 funnel. If you’re stuck, pick the stage where your funnel snapshot showed the biggest loss in actual people. Step two is the audience: the specific group whose behavior you want to change. Not “everyone in Central Texas,” but “couples in their thirties who’ve never two-stepped and live within twenty minutes.” A message built for everybody lands with nobody. A good goal has four parts you can check: who changes, what they do, by how much, and by when. If one is missing, the goal can’t be tested. “More regulars” has no number and no date. “Ten more people meeting the Regular rule on Thursdays by June 30, against a baseline of twenty-four” has all four.

Step three is the message: the one thing you want that audience to think or feel, in their words, with a reason to believe it. Chapter 5 is all about this step. Step four is the channel: the place or person that will carry the message to the audience. This is where the Chapter 2 sorting helps. Ask which of owned, earned, shared, or paid reaches that particular group at the lowest cost in dollars and in hours, and remember that the best channel is often a person. Step five is the measure: the number that will show whether the goal was met, where you’ll get it, and what the number was before you started. If the baseline isn’t known yet, the first task on the page is to measure it, which is Chapter 23. Channel choices should follow from the audience and the message, not from habit. If the audience is couples who have never two-stepped, the channel might be a coworker’s invitation, a beginner-friendly listing, or a short clip that shows the first lesson is easy. It is probably not a post aimed at your existing followers, who are already dancing.

The reason it’s a page and not a plan is discipline. A page fits on the wall behind the bar, or in the back of the booking notebook, or in the notes app of a touring musician. It forces choices. You can’t write six goals on it, and if you try, the sixth is probably where your attention will drift anyway. The worksheet at the end of this chapter is the page. Make copies of it. Fill one out for every effort that takes more than a few hours or a few dollars, and file the finished ones; Chapter 34 shows you how to review them, and Chapter 39 shows you how to retire the ones that didn’t earn their keep. Keep old pages. A stack of completed pages is a record of what you tried, what you expected, and what happened. After a year it becomes the most useful planning document you own, because it tells you which kinds of goals your room actually hits.

4.3 Know Whom You’re Talking To

The audience step is where most plans quietly fail, because “our crowd” feels like something you already know. You do know them, but often as individuals rather than as a group you can aim at. Volume Four’s Audience Mirror asks you to define who you’re speaking to by what they want from your room and your presence, and to describe your best viewer as a real person: where they live, why they care, and what makes them come back. Writing that person down does something useful. It turns a guess into a claim you can check. If you wrote “thirty-something couples,” the next time you stand at the door you can count whether that’s who’s walking in. Count before you claim. A week of quiet notes at the door, such as rough ages, couples or groups, first-timers or regulars, tells you more about who your crowd actually is than any amount of remembering. It doesn’t need names, and it shouldn’t collect them.

Audiences aren’t one thing, even inside one room. Volume Five’s Room Segment Map reads the crowd as distinct groups with different needs while still hosting one shared floor: the nervous beginner, the social dancer, the show-off, the purist, the person watching from the rail. Each group has a different obstacle and wants a different welcome. The same is true in a honky tonk at large. The Friday after-work group, the Saturday date-night couples, the Sunday songwriter crowd, and the Thursday students may share a building and nothing else. Decide which segment each effort is for. A plan aimed at “the crowd” will usually work for the segment that was already coming. It helps to pick a primary segment for each effort and name the others you’re willing to disappoint a little. A beginner night aimed at nervous newcomers may bore the hot-shot dancers, and that is an acceptable cost if the goal is first-timers who come back.

One caution, and it comes from the plain facts of how people behave. Wanting a certain kind of person to walk in is not the same as having a reason for them to. If your best viewer is a couple who’s never danced, but your marketing shows only advanced dancers in a fast-moving pack, you’ve written one audience on the page and spoken to another on the street. The audience step is only finished when the message and the pictures match the person you described. A fast check: show your flyer or page to someone who fits the description and ask them what kind of night they think it is. Their answer is data. If it surprises you, the plan has a gap. Asking is cheap and humbling. The answers will often tell you that the audience you imagined isn’t the one your materials invite, and that is exactly the kind of gap a plan should catch before you spend.

4.4 Choosing the Kind of Night You Are

Some strategic decisions look like programming decisions. Volume Five’s Channel Choice frames the choice of dance style for a night as an audience-positioning decision, not merely a personal preference. Two-step, waltz, line dance, swing, or a beginner mix attract different people at different comfort levels, and the choice sends a message before anyone reads a word. The same is true of a music night’s format, an open mic against a songwriters’ round, or a bartender’s choice of whether to feature classic cocktails or a local beer list. Each one is a promise about who the night is for. The tactic is to make that choice on purpose and test every later decision against it. This applies to every chair. A band chooses what kind of act it is when it picks a set list. A bartender chooses when she decides what her content is about. A teacher chooses when she decides whether a class is for absolute beginners or for dancers who want to polish. Each choice says who the work is for.

Here is the test in practice. Finish the sentence “This night is for people who want to ______.” Then check each decision against it: the start time, the cover, the lesson, the house band, the playlist between sets, the drink special, the photos you post. If the sentence says “learn to two-step without feeling foolish,” a loud late set and a crowded floor of experts works against it. If the sentence says “dance hard until close,” a long slow lesson at nine does. The decisions that fail the test aren’t necessarily wrong. They’re just for a different night. Many a room has two or three of them layered onto one evening, and wonders why no group is happy. Running two nights inside one evening can work if each has its own hour and its own promise, such as a beginner lesson at seven and a dancer’s floor after eight. It fails when the two compete for the same space at the same time without anyone deciding which comes first.

The choice also decides what you measure. A night built for beginners lives or dies on the number of first-timers who come back, so its key number is the second-visit rate. A night built for dedicated dancers cares about regulars and their frequency. A night built to fill an off-night may care about the sheer count of new faces. If you pick a night’s purpose and then judge it by a number that belongs to another purpose, you’ll call a success a failure, or the other way round. Chapter 22 teaches the pairing. For now, write the purpose in the Goal box of the worksheet and see what number it asks for. Write down the number now, before you start. If you wait until after the night to decide what counts as success, you will almost always pick whichever number looks best, and the page loses its point.

4.5 Strategy at Four Sizes

The same page works at four sizes, and it helps to see them so you don’t overbuild. The first is the year: one or two goals, set in the quiet weeks after the holidays, the base for Chapter 36’s annual plan. The second is the quarter, which is the natural length for a real test. Three months is long enough to see a pattern in a weekly night and short enough to change course before a year is wasted. The third is the single effort, such as a launch, a partnership, or a clip series, which gets its own copy of the page. The fourth is the night itself, where the page shrinks to a sentence: what is tonight for, and who is it for? A good host asks that question at four in the afternoon. Matching the size of the plan to the size of the effort keeps the page from becoming a chore. A year gets an hour. A quarter gets twenty minutes. A campaign gets ten. A night gets a sentence. If you find yourself spending an hour planning a single night, you are probably planning the wrong thing.

Different roles use the page differently, and the Role Box at the end of this chapter spells it out. An owner’s goals are usually about the room: more first-timers, a stronger Tuesday, a higher return rate. A booker’s are about the roster and the relationships behind it. A musician’s may be about being rebooked or about getting a first date in a new town. A bartender-creator’s may be about audience, income, or house promotion, in the order Volume Four set out. A dance teacher’s may be about the step from beginner class to live floor. The five steps don’t change. Only the goal does, and it’s worth the time to get it right. People who work across several rooms, like touring musicians and teachers who rotate venues, can keep one page for their own work and a short note for each room. The note says what that room is for and what the room expects from them, which keeps the personal plan from pulling against the house.

Last, a word on revising. A plan that’s never revised is a plan nobody’s checking. If a goal turns out to have been wrong, say so on the page, change it, and note the date. That isn’t failure. It’s the sort of honest record that makes the next plan better, and it protects you from rewriting history in your own favor. When you reach Chapter 31 you’ll see how to test a single change fairly, and in Chapter 34 you’ll see how to decide, quarter by quarter, whether to keep, fix, or drop each effort. All of that depends on this one page being filled in before the effort begins. Date every revision. Six months from now, “changed the goal on March 3 because the Tuesday lesson moved to Wednesday” is the sentence that explains why the numbers jumped.

THE 4 TACTICS FILED HERE

Each tactic below came from an earlier volume. This is where it belongs, how it tends to break, and the one number that tells you whether it is working.

• Primary Goal Filter. From: Vol 4, Ch 3. How it fails: The goal is an activity (“post more”) instead of a change, or the filter is applied to everything but the favorite idea. The number: Share of your tactics tied to one written goal.
• Audience Mirror. From: Vol 4, Ch 4. How it fails: The “best viewer” is a flattering guess nobody checks against who actually walks in. The number: Share of new guests who match the audience you named.
• The Channel Choice. From: Vol 5, Ch 20. How it fails: The style is picked for the host’s taste while the marketing promises something else. The number: First-timers per night for the featured style vs. a comparison night.
• The Room Segment Map. From: Vol 5, Ch 21. How it fails: The map is drawn once and filed; the obstacle for each group is never turned into a welcome. The number: Return rate of each segment (beginners, couples, visitors).

CASE STUDY

Six Ideas, One Goal

Odell books a Thursday songwriter night at a small honky tonk. Over the summer he tries six things: a weekly social post, a flyer run, a free-drink-with-lesson offer, a guest host, a local radio mention, and a text club. By September he can’t say which, if any, mattered. Attendance moved around: 41, 38, 52, 47, 44, 61, 39, 45, 50, 43 across ten Thursdays.

Step 1 — The average he had. 41 + 38 = 79, plus 52 is 131, plus 47 is 178, plus 44 is 222, plus 61 is 283, plus 39 is 322, plus 45 is 367, plus 50 is 417, plus 43 is 460. 460 ÷ 10 = 46. The normal swing runs from 38 to 61. With six efforts running at once, he can’t tell which Thursday belongs to which.

Step 2 — The page, filled in late. Odell writes a goal: “Raise the number of first-timers who come back for a second Thursday.” Audience: songwriters’ friends who’ve never been. Message: “Come hear the song before it’s on the radio.” Channel: the writers themselves, one invitation each. Measure: second-visit rate, by hand, from a tally at the door. He drops four of the six efforts for the next quarter, which frees about six hours a week.

Step 3 — What the quarter shows. In the first month he tallies 24 first-timers, and 6 return within thirty days: 6 ÷ 24 = 25%. After the quarter the tally is 80 first-timers and 28 returners: 28 ÷ 80 = 35%. The lift is ten points on a small base, so he treats it as encouraging rather than proven. The point isn’t the number. The point is that for the first time he can say what he tried and what happened.

These figures are illustrative and small, and a quarter with other changes in it would not settle the question. The lesson is the order of operations, not the result: the page comes first, the tactics fit it, and the measure was chosen before the work.

REAL TALK

From the booking desk:

For years I answered every “what should we do?” with whatever I’d seen work somewhere else. It felt like experience. What it really was, was a habit of never choosing. The day I wrote a single goal on an index card and taped it above the phone, I said no to nine things in a week. Eight of them I haven’t missed.

HEADS UP

Setting a budget on the page raises tax and legal questions: what counts as a deductible business expense, how to record a barter deal such as free drinks for a favor, and whether a promotion you plan is allowed for an alcohol seller. Those answers depend on your entity, your records, and Texas rules, including those enforced by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Ask a CPA about the books and a licensed Texas attorney about any promotion that involves alcohol, and see Appendix J.

MEASURE IT

The number: Share of your active efforts that have a written goal, a named audience, and a measure with a baseline, out of everything you are currently running.

By hand: List every ongoing effort on a sheet of paper. Next to each, check three boxes: goal written, audience named, baseline known. Count the efforts with all three checks and divide by the total. Example: 2 efforts with all three out of 6 total = 2 ÷ 6 = 33%. Aim to bring that to 100% before you add anything new.

Watch out: A goal written after the fact doesn’t count. If the date on the page is later than the start of the effort, mark it as a lesson, not a pass.

Go deeper: Chapter 22 (turning a goal into a metric tree) and Chapter 23 (the baseline).

ROLE BOX

• Owner: Pick one funnel stage to improve this quarter and write its goal on the page. Use the Room Segment Map to decide which group the effort is for.
• Booker: Write a goal for the roster, such as more rebooks from acts that fit, and use the Channel Choice to decide what each night is for.
• Musician: Your goal might be a rebook, a first date in a new room, or a larger draw. Pick one, name the booker or fan you want to reach, and measure that.
• Bartender: Use the Primary Goal Filter first: tips, local name, brand income, house promotion, preservation, or exit. Say no to content that serves a different goal.
• Dance Teacher: Fill in the Channel Choice sentence for each class and night, then map the segments in your room. Your goal usually sits at the step from lesson to live floor.

THE ONE-PAGE PR PLAN

Copy this page for every effort that takes more than a few hours or a few dollars. Fill it in before you start. Date it.

Fill in: Effort, Owner of the effort, Start date, Review date.

• 1. Goal What change do we want, by when? Name one funnel stage: First-Timer, First Win, Regular, or Ambassador.
• 2. Audience Which specific group are we trying to reach, and what do they want from us? Describe one real person.
• 3. Message What one thing should that person think or feel, and what is our proof? (Chapter 5)
• 4. Channel Owned, earned, shared, or paid? Which person or place carries it, and what does it cost in dollars and hours?
• 5. Measure Which one number shows it worked, where do we get it, and what was it before we started? (Baseline known: Yes / No, measure first)
• 6. Next If the number moves, what do we do? If it does not, what do we do?

TALK ABOUT IT

• Pick the effort that took the most of your time last quarter. Could you have written its goal in one sentence before you started? What does that tell you?
• Who is your best viewer, guest, booker, or student? Describe them as a real person, then ask yourself when you last checked that against who actually showed up.
• Which of your nights fails its own “This night is for people who want to” sentence? What would you have to change, or stop doing, to fix it?