
Winging it can be pretty awesome.
Like if you’re visiting a city for the first time and decide to just wander around (instead of going to all the big attractions).
Or if you just got a new car and you want to see what it can do (instead of sitting around for a few hours reading the manual and watching videos).
But when it comes to your business—when it comes to marketing for your business—winging it just won’t do.
Now, you probably know a business that seems to win no matter what they do, but guess what?
Even businesses that seem to have all the luck do better when they’re not winging it.
Why? Because marketing isn’t a winging it kind of activity.
Marketing Works Best When It’s Highly Targeted

Believe me: if you could just pour money into a website somewhere and watch sales skyrocket, we wouldn’t have a job.
Even if you had many millions of dollars to spend on marketing, you could still end up making a total mess of things and wasting it all if you weren’t very, very careful about how you spent it.
Here’s the deal: people see something like 5,000 to 7,000 marketing messages every single day.
No one has the budget to dominate volume like that—no one.
Which means that everyone is being highly intentional and highly targeted with their marketing efforts.
You name a marketing tactic, and you’ll find this happening.
Email marketing? The most successful email marketers are chopping their lists up into many different segments and sending targeted emails to each one.
Social advertising? People spend hours making sure they’re targeting the exact right people, as granularly as possible, to make sure their highly targeted and highly specific ad is only going to people it has the maximum chance of working on.
Even when people used to blast ads on TVs, they were still targeting—making sure their ad, which would only resonate with certain people, would run before/during/after a show that those specific people would be most likely to watch.
If this is true of marketing at the level of an individual tactic and campaign, it’s true of marketing as a whole.
All your marketing should be as focused as possible.
It should follow a plan—a blueprint.
Your Goals Can Be Messy, but Your Blueprint Should Be Focused

We love messy goals. Goals that are:
- Mission-Aligned: goals should support your long-term vision and values (PiPP)
- Exponential & Earnest: ambitious yet pursued with dedication
- Sifted From the Heap: focus on 1–3 core goals, filtering out the less important ones
- Simple & Memorable: easy to remember and guide daily decisions
- Uniquely Yours: tailored to your specific needs and circumstances
For example, we love the idea of shooting to grow revenue by 10x this year—that’s a great, messy goal!
But the way you get there should be well thought out, well planned, and executed with a high level of specificity and clarity.
If I told someone I wanted to walk from Denton, Texas to Canada, that’s a big, messy goal…
But there are many ways to get there, and the way I pick will matter a great deal—I can’t just start hiking north and hope for the best. I won’t get there (I’ll probably get stuck at a mountain range I should have gone around or a river I can’t cross).
To keep the metaphor going: you don’t just want a clear path—you want to map out the entire journey.
Where will I spend the night every night? How much gear should I carry with me each day? How much food? What about water? Where are the best points to stop if I’m tired? Where can I stock back up on food and water every single day?
Very quickly, we get into the dirty details, but those dirty details are the only way my messy goal has any chance of happening.
The same goes for your marketing. Growing by 10x in one year might have dozens of pathways to success—you have to map out each one as granularly as possible…
So that you don’t end up stranded in Colorado somewhere with no water and a mountain range between you and Canada.
Get a Custom Marketing Strategy to Get You to Your Messy Goal
If I were to write a post about how to write a marketing strategy like what I’ve described above, it would be about 20 times longer than this (maybe double that).
And I’m not convinced it would do you a lot of good: every business is different, their goals are different, and their resources are different…
Which means you need something customized if you want to succeed.