(Photo by Tony Fischer)

You’ve just spent a lot of money and time hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) expert for your website. The tweaks to your website go live, and you get a large influx of traffic. But you don’t increase your sales or leads. What happened?

You get marketing tunnel vision when you focus on a specific task without considering the whole strategy picture. Before spending time on SEO, you should ensure that your website is optimized to convert visitors into customers. If it isn’t, then you’ll be getting even more people who are looking but not buying what you’re selling.

Or if you’ve spent a lot of time organizing a great event, full of interesting people, and delicious food – but you leave the marketing of the event to the last minute (and don’t sell out). Another case of tunnel vision.

Or perhaps you create a great product, priced well, with great advertising. You get a stampede of orders and find that you don’t have the time or capital to meet your demand. More tunnel vision.

To avoid tunnel vision, you need to start with a big picture strategy. What does a successful outcome look like? What steps do you need to take to achieve them? In what order? What resources do you need (and when)? How will you test that you’re on the right path? What systems can you put in place that can scale up when you hit a bottleneck? What backup systems can you put in place in case something unexpected happens?

Keep your eye on the “prize”, but make sure that you don’t forget to spend adequate time on the “boring” stuff to make sure you’ll see your dreams realized.