Most marketing advice starts with tactics: post more on social media, run some ads, fix your SEO. I start somewhere else. Every conversation at Blanc Page, whether it’s a first call or a strategy for a large business, begins with two simple questions.
- What do you want to do?
- What do you want to achieve?
They sound almost too simple. But answering them honestly does more to shape good marketing than any tool or trend. This article explains what each question means, why there are two of them, and how they guide everything that follows.
Question 1: What do you want to do?
This is about the action you have in mind. Most business owners already have a sense of it, even if they’ve never put it into words. It might sound like:
- “Beat my competition at social media.”
- “Raise my online presence.”
- “Build a website that gains attention.”
- “Show up when people search for what I sell.”
- “Stop wasting money on ads that don’t seem to work.”
There’s no wrong answer, and you don’t need marketing language to give one. “I want people to know we exist” is a perfectly good answer. The point is to get what’s in your head onto paper, so we’re both working on the same thing.
Question 2: What do you want to achieve?
This is about the result: what will be different in your business if the marketing works. The best answers have a number in them:
- “Land 100 leads.”
- “Grow to 1,000 followers.”
- “Book 20 new jobs a month.”
- “Get 10 enquiries a week from our website.”
If you’re not sure what number to put down, that’s completely normal. Step 3 of this series is all about turning a feeling like “I want more customers” into a goal you can actually measure.
Why two questions and not one?
Because what you want to do and what you want to achieve aren’t always the same thing, and the gap between them is where good planning happens.
Take a business that wants to grow its Instagram following (question 1) so that it can land 100 new customers this year (question 2). Followers can help, but they don’t automatically turn into customers. Knowing both answers lets us check whether the activity you have in mind is actually the shortest path to the result you want, or whether something else would get you there faster.
Sometimes the answer is “yes, keep going, just do it better”. Sometimes it’s “that’s a good idea, but fix this other thing first”. Either way, you get a reason, not just a recommendation.
How the two questions shape the work
Every Blanc Page engagement follows the same four steps, and the two questions run through all of them:
- Conversation. We write down your two answers in your own words.
- Audit. I look at where your marketing is today compared with those answers: what’s helping, what isn’t, and what’s missing.
- Plan. We agree the shortest sensible path from what you’re doing now to what you want to achieve, including priorities and a budget.
- Deliver. I do the work with you, or hand it over with templates your team can use, and we keep checking progress against question 2.
Try it now
Grab a piece of paper and write down your two answers. Don’t overthink them; a rough first version is fine. Keep that paper handy, because every article in this series refers back to it.
About this series
Start with a blank page is a 12-step series for business owners who are new to marketing. It assumes no background at all. Each step explains one idea in plain English, from what marketing actually is through to websites, Google, AI search, social media, advertising and measuring what works, and finishes with a simple 90-day plan.
Next step: What is marketing, really? A plain-English starting point