How do you decide what’s next on your marketing to-do list? Is it based on what’s popular, new and exciting? Or, is it linked to a larger strategy that has your business and marketing goals in mind?

One of these plans relies simply on tactics, while the other incorporates a larger vision. Which one do you think will be more effective?

When creating a successful marketing plan, it’s important to incorporate both strategy and tactics. Rather than opposing one another, the strategy informs the tactical choices. Anyone who tries to separate the strategic from the tactical is missing the big picture.

Strategic marketing 101

Strategic marketing is about setting goals and making a plan that focuses on achieving them. Strategic marketing involves looking at:

• Your target audience (demographics, psychographics, geographics) and how you might effectively be able to reach them

• Your competition, industry trends and market projections

• Your strengths and weaknesses as a business, as well as the opportunities and threats facing your company

• The problems you’re trying to solve and how you plan on solving them

• Your long-term company goals and what metrics are relevant when analyzing your progress

Without a good overview of the market and how you fit into it, you simply won’t know where to invest your time and energy to achieve the results you’re looking for.

These insights will help provide clarity on the tactics you should be using. 

Tactical marketing 101

Tactics are the more every day, get-stuff-done part of marketing. It’s the execution phase. It’s investing in SEO, posting on social media, and building a website.

Tactical marketing on its own isn't always part of a bigger plan. It's "doing marketing" when you remember, when you get desperate, or when you see someone else doing something that looks like it’s working.

Tactical marketing is mostly about instinct, and when it’s left on its own without a clear strategy behind it, that instinct is like our flight or fight response. It’s simply going to have your business surviving by responding retroactively, rather than thriving by being proactive.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu, on war

Combining strategy and tactics

As Tzu suggests, strategy and tactics must work together.

Once you’ve established the big picture in a marketing strategy that will help you reach your business goals, you can outline the specific tactics that will help you get there.

Think of this process almost like you’re planning a trip. If you know you want to go on vacation but don’t do any of the research or planning beforehand, you end up heading out on the road without much direction. Each action you take is a tactic you think is going to get you there, but you don’t really know where you’re going, or the purpose of your trip, let alone the best way to get there.

Alternatively, you could decide what kind of trip you want to take (Do you want to explore or relax? Do you want to ski and sit by the fire or swim and lounge by the ocean?), pick a destination that reflects that intention, look at the map, and decide the best route to take.

Building a strategy is like the trip planning process. It means analyzing your path, looking at where you want to go, thinking about what route makes the most sense, deciding where your stops will be, and whether or not you want to take the scenic route.

This is the kind of forward-thinking that a strategy brings. It becomes the direction that all your actions are based on.

You shouldn’t be choosing whether to work on one or the other, but rather looking at how both are infused into your marketing.

There will always be a variety of tactics you could be using, but tactics without a strategy could take you in a direction you don’t want to go, or not produce the results you want. On the other hand, if you spend all your time planning your strategy without ever taking action on it, you’re never going to reach your goals.

The questions you should be asking

• Are the tactics you’re using informed by a strategy? Or are they simply based on instinct?

• Are you looking at what everyone else is doing, or are you developing a plan that’s unique to your business goals?

• Are you spending all of your time planning, without ever executing? Strategy without tactics isn’t effective either!

• Are you testing, keeping track of your results, and tweaking as you go?

Work on combining strategy and tactics, and you’ll have much greater success creating a marketing plan that works for you. Start with your strategy, and from there decide on the tactics you’ll use.