“I’d like to see the strategy.” That’s a common refrain from business leaders after the marketing team has presented a plan, and it tends to leave both sides frustrated. The C-suite feels it didn’t get what it asked for. The marketing team feels the forest isn’t being appreciated for the trees.
This friction is as common as it is costly, and it almost always traces back to the same root cause: the word strategy means different things to different people. Getting everyone speaking the same language is the first step toward actually building one.
- Goals, budgets, and campaign plans are not the same thing as strategy.
- Customer insight is the essential input that turns marketing activity into an informed plan.
- Overinvesting in the wrong channel can drain limited budgets before meaningful growth begins.
- Talking directly to their best customers can help even small businesses build smarter strategy.
Without that alignment, marketing budgets get spread across disconnected tactics, results are inconsistent, and teams cycle through a low-grade defeatism that makes the next effort harder to sustain. None of that is a recipe for growth.
What a strategy is not (and what it is)
A strategy is not:
- A social media campaign.
- An email campaign.
- A series of blog posts.
- A marketing calendar.
- A goal.
- A mission statement.
- A step-by-step replication of what your best competitors are doing.
None of these equals a strategy on its own, but a successful strategy likely will contain, and actually needs, some of them. The distinction matters.
Here’s an analogy that tends to cut through the confusion. Your family of four (the organization) needs to get from Denver to Walt Disney World in Orlando (the goal) within six months (the timeline) for less than $2,000 (the budget). With those parameters established, the strategy is the plan for getting to the destination using the resources you have available. Do you walk, drive, or fly?
The tactics follow from that choice. Walk, and you’ll save money — but where will you sleep and eat? Drive, and you’ll need to plan for fuel and rest stops along the way. Fly, and many of those logistical challenges disappear, but will the budget allow for it?
The analogy isn’t a perfect model for marketing, but it’s useful for building shared language: A marketing strategy is an informed plan that accounts for goals, tactics, timelines, and budgets. Here is where we want to be — and here is how we get there on time and within our means.
The essential ingredient: the customer
Many businesses enter the cannabis industry focused on execution: getting products to market, building a retail presence, establishing supply chains. That urgency is understandable. The cost, though, is that customer research often gets deprioritized until something stops working. And one of the first casualties of skipping that research is the absence of a clear answer to a deceptively simple question: Who is buying from us, and why?
Without that answer, strategy tends to drift toward assumption. Social media is where this shows up most often. The belief that social drives sales isn’t baseless, but it frequently skips a critical question: How do likes, shares, and comments actually convert to revenue? In most cases, the honest answer is they don’t do so directly. Social media engagement largely serves an entertainment function. A customer scrolls past and finds the content worth a moment of attention. That has real value for brand familiarity, but it rarely shifts business trajectory on its own. It’s worth examining whether social deserves the outsized share of marketing resources it typically receives in this industry.
If your ideal customer’s true purchasing habits and platforms of influence aren’t at the center of the strategy, the result is usually the same: a rotation of tactics that feel busy but don’t compound.
The cost of strategy built on assumption
When a business relies on a single tactic to find new customers, it’s making an implicit bet that those customers are forming both awareness and purchasing decisions through that one channel, and the audience is actually there. That’s a heavy expectation for any single tactic to carry.
Beyond the likely disappointment in results, over-investing in the wrong place can exhaust a budget before there’s an opportunity to execute anything more strategic. With resources depleted, the ability to reach prospects through the right channel — with the right message, repeated enough times to register — is sharply reduced. That’s a constraint well-resourced competitors are unlikely to share.
The concern that there isn’t enough budget to invest in more than one channel is real. But spending limited dollars in the wrong place produces no return regardless. A modest investment in understanding where purchasing decisions actually are being made tends to outperform a larger spend placed on instinct.
What a customer-centered strategy actually looks like
More data is always better, but a small business doesn’t need to spend five figures on audience research to start putting customers at the center of its strategy.
The most accessible starting point: identify the top ten customers you’d most like to replicate and talk to them. Consider purchase value, shopping frequency, and consistency of need when assembling the list. Ask for a few minutes of their time to share what’s on their mind. People generally appreciate being asked, and a small incentive — a cup of coffee, a pre-roll — can go a long way toward making the conversation happen.
Within those conversations, patterns emerge: why they chose you over competitors, how they first found you, whether seeing your brand on social media would actually influence a purchase, and what they value most about the experience. Those customers are effectively handing over a roadmap — one that reduces the need for expensive experimentation and the risk of heavily committing to the wrong channel. Replacing assumption with direct feedback is one of the highest-ROI moves available to a resource-constrained business.
The goal is presence where customers are influenced and where meaningful buying decisions form. Budget may not allow for visibility everywhere, and that’s fine. The priority should be relevance at the moment of truth: when a decision is being formed or finalized. From there, a business can expand thoughtfully into adjacent channels that support the brand over time.
Understanding what matters to your prospect, how they move toward a decision, and deliberately prioritizing where to invest — within real constraints — is the essence of a strategy. The prospect is the input; strategy is the logic that connects that input to a measurable result.
What happens when a real strategy is in place
When an informed plan exists, the work becomes more disciplined and more legible. Instead of placing bets on disconnected tactics, resources go where prospects are actually making decisions. Feedback is cleaner and more actionable. Over time, ineffective tactics get eliminated, effective paths to purchase get reinforced, and adjacent opportunities can be tested with purpose rather than hope.
No business is too small or too resource-constrained to benefit from this approach. If anything, the tighter the budget, the more important it becomes to spend based on evidence rather than intuition. Understanding why customers have chosen you in the past — and how to find more of them — isn’t a luxury. It’s what separates intentional growth from accidental growth.
People are typically slow to change buying habits and platforms of influence, which means the customer insights you gather today will remain actionable well into your next planning cycle. The information has a longer shelf life than most business owners assume.
As you build your next marketing plan, start with your next best customer. Understand their behavior, their concerns, their motivations. Hold every dollar to the same standard: What evidence exists that this spend leads to a sale?
When strategy guides those decisions, marketing stops being an expense to justify and becomes an investment you can stand behind.
Before you start
What questions should I ask during customer interviews?
Keep the conversation open-ended and focused on behavior rather than opinion. Ask how they first heard about you, what prompted them to make their first purchase, and what almost stopped them. Find out which other options they considered and why they chose you instead. Ask what they’d miss most if you closed tomorrow. Avoid leading questions that invite flattery; you’re looking for patterns in how decisions actually form, not reassurance that customers like you. Five honest interviews will tell you more than fifty survey responses designed to confirm what you already believe.
How do I identify the right ten customers to talk to?
Start with purchase data, not gut feel. Sort your customer list by a combination of total spend, purchase frequency, and recency. The customers who buy often, spend meaningfully, and keep coming back are the ones whose behavior you most want to understand and replicate. Avoid selecting based on who’s easiest to reach or most likely to say something positive. The goal is a representative sample of your best customers, not a focus group of your biggest fans.
How is customer insight different from market research?
Market research typically describes a broad audience — demographics, category trends, aggregate behavior. Customer insight is narrower and more actionable: It reflects the specific motivations, habits, and decision-making patterns of the people already buying from you. Both have value, but for a resource-constrained business, customer insight tends to deliver faster and more directly applicable returns. You’re not trying to understand the cannabis consumer in general. You’re trying to understand why your customers chose you and how to find more of a similar type.
Based in Denver, Tyler Jacobson is director of marketing at Hybrid Marketing Co., a full-service creative agency serving highly regulated industries including cannabis and hemp. With more than twenty years of digital marketing experience, he specializes in turning visions into actionable outcomes by understanding customer needs, simplifying complexity, and aligning teams around shared goals.
