Why You Need Strategic Marketing AND Tactical Marketing To Achieve Your Goals
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Good marketers constantly experiment, and often end up adjusting their overall strategy and the tactics they use to achieve their strategic goals. Not every experiment is going to succeed, and that’s OK; every marketer makes mistakes sometimes. But the biggest and most costly mistake that a marketing professional can make is not understanding the difference between “strategic marketing” and “tactical marketing” in the first place.
This post will walk you through a quick discussion of the difference between strategic marketing and tactical marketing, why it matters, and how Suzy can help.
Tactics, Strategy — What’s the Difference and Why Does It Matter?
There is no single accepted definition of marketing strategy or strategic marketing. In a military context, however, "strategy" typically focuses on long-term planning and development of a nation's forces, whereas "tactics" refer to how the troops are actually deployed in combat. To phrase it another way, tactics are used in an individual battle, and strategy is used for the overall war.
Putting this in marketing terms:
Marketing strategy is your overall plan and objectives/goals (10% net new customer growth)
Marketing tactics are the actions you take to achieve those goals (blogs, email nurture campaigns, etc.)
Tactics without strategy is a recipe for failure. Of course, a strategy that is never implemented will also fail.
Sun Tzu nailed this difference 1,500 years ago: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat."
Without a strategic marketing goal, you’re just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. Without tactics, you may as well have not wasted time creating a marketing strategy.
You need both.
Marketing tactics MUST support your marketing strategy. For example: Blogging is a top marketing tactic, and a quick Google search will show you more articles that you could ever read about how to create your blogging strategy. However, the strategic reason that you’re writing and sharing blog posts isn’t just “to create a blog.” Your overall strategic goal could be to reduce customer churn and improve loyalty by sharing best-practice tips on how to get the most out of your product. Or, your blog could fit into your overall inbound marketing strategy (more on that in a sec) to attract new leads by providing them with great information about their challenges. Success is measured by new leads that can then be nurtured into customers.
Let’s look at it this way. Whatever you want to call it — your road map, blueprint, master plan, etc. — you need to have an overall goal, like new customers, a percentage of revenue growth, or penetration into a new market segment. Whatever the objective is, it must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based). That’s your marketing strategy.
In the context of your strategic marketing goal, what actions are you going to take to get there? Will you blog, use paid search, try influencer marketing, social media outreach, and/or the hundreds of other marketing actions you can take? Those are your marketing tactics.
To put it into a Suzy perspective: “strategy” will most likely inform why you’re asking your consumers questions, whereas “tactics” relate closer to the content, campaigns, and assets you’re actually testing.
At the risk of this reading like an Escher drawing, you’ll also need individual strategies for how you’ll implement each of these marketing tactics. And blogging, social media, paid search, etc. each have their own tactics you’ll need to test and master.
A Short Word About “Inbound Marketing”
What’s inbound marketing? It’s a cultural shift in marketing away from being product-focused to a total focus on helping your customers and potential customers. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of marketing automation platform HubSpot, coined the official definition nearly 10 years ago:
“Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don't want, inbound marketing forms connections they're looking for and solves problems they already have.”
One common failing of inbound marketers is to over-focus on “inbound.” Of course, you want to attract people to you with informative content that helps them solve their problems. However, it’s easy to forget that while the initial phase of inbound marketing is focused on attracting people to you, outbound marketing goes hand-in-hand with inbound and is essential for success. You have to use tools to reach your customers— email, social media, texts, and messaging apps, for example.
To mangle a metaphor, if you build it, they will come— but to keep them around, you need to turn on the loudspeakers so everyone can hear you.
Too many marketers mistake a flurry of activity for strategy. Some focus too much on creating the “perfect” strategy and don’t focus enough time on achieving their goals — and others never take the time to test their tactics with consumers to see if they’re resonating at all.
Here's what can happen when marketers mistake marketing activity for strategic marketing:
5 Ways a Lacking Marketing Strategy Will Hurt Your Business
Let’s take two examples of marketing tactics that many businesses try (and then abandon because they “didn’t work”): Social media and blogging. Individually, each of these marketing tactics can help build your business. Blogging provides answers to customer questions and attracts visitors to your website. Social media can be used to directly engage with customers, building relationships.
When you have an overall strategic marketing strategy (increasing customer retention and new customer acquisition by 10% each, for example), you can plan how you use these tactics so that one plus one equals three.
Social media can be used to extend the reach of your blogging efforts by sharing in the appropriate channels. Blog topics can be informed by social media outreach and analyzing customer interest and sentiment. Without a strategy, it’s easy for the social team and the blogging team to become disconnected, operating in parallel rather than amplifying each other’s efforts. Here are five common "results" when a business ignores strategic marketing.
Competitors Will Outpace You. Right now, one of your competitors is taking the time to think through their marketing strategy. While you continue your scattershot approach, hoping you hit something, they’re systematically creating goals and a strategy to reach those goals. By the end of this year, who do you think is going to have had a more successful year and be positioned for success going into the next?
You’ll Waste Time - And Budget. With a marketing strategy in place, you’ll have a framework for action. With focus and clarity on your direction, you’ll be able to spend your valuable time working to accomplish your goals.
No strategy means no framework to make decisions within. Each time you decide to try a marketing tactic, you’ll waste time trying to decide how it meets a goal. Google or Facebook ads can be an effective way to generate sales. Unless you have a plan to nurture any leads from your ads, though, you may as well spend that budget taking your team out to lunch – you'll at least have a full stomach from your spend.
Inconsistent Results Tracking. Marketing automation tools allow you to track hundreds of data points (email open rates, conversion statistics, page visits and time on site, etc.) that can tell you the story of how effective your marketing is. Without a marketing strategy in place, it’s almost impossible to identify trends and how your efforts are supporting (or detracting from) one another.
Lack of Follow-Through on Success. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then; some marketing tactics you’re throwing at the wall might stick. When you experience success, do you have any idea what to do next? Will you be able to identify why you were successful? Will you be able to double-down on that success with a follow-up campaign? If you don’t, you’ll return to randomly chucking tactics at that wall.
Customer Confusion. When you don’t have a clear direction, your customer communications will be driven by instinct (which is often wrong without supporting data) or demands to meet quarterly goals. Good businesses build relationships with customers. Without a strategic marketing plan in place to support your customers with informative content or a coherent sequence of emails to upsell a product (as one example) you’ll confuse or annoy your customers with sporadic messaging and episodic deluges of emails.
Time for You to Create Your Marketing Strategy
Whatever the size of your business or the industry you're in, when you create a powerful marketing strategy and support it with the right marketing tactics, you’ll attract more customers. However, (and unfortunately,) the old Wanamaker quote still feels true for many marketers, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” You can study your own data in an attempt to figure out "which half," but unless you're speaking directly to your consumers and finding out what truly resonates with them you'll never identify "which half."
Suzy helps you take the guesswork out of your ideas by connecting you directly with your target audience to get real time feedback on everything, from campaign concepts to copy testing and even asset design. No more wondering, “Will people like this idea?" — instead, You’ll use the insights you collect from Suzy's consumer panel to craft the perfect message that you know will resonate when you push “go” on your next strategic marketing campaign.
Remember: your marketing strategy will never be “finished.” Consumer tastes change, as will your business, which means you can’t roll out the same ideas year after year. With Suzy, you’ll be able to iterate and follow-up with your audience over and over again, so you can keep matching your tactics to your consumers’ tastes and desires to ultimately achieve your strategic marketing goals that much more efficiently.
