What Is The Difference Between Marketing Strategy & Marketing Tactics?

When researching topics to write about for this week's blog, I came across an interesting question when I did a Google search . . . and that question was this:

"What is the difference between marketing strategies and marketing tactics?"

I thought this was such a great question because the two often get confused a lot.  The truth is, that while they mean different things, they are both equally important, and you can have efficient tactics without a great marketing strategy, and you'll never implement your great marketing strategy if you don't have great tactics to back it up.  So today, I want to break down what the two mean, and how you can build a holistic marketing plan for your business!

 First, let's start with strategy, because if you start with the tactics first (which, unfortunately, a lot of business owners do), then you're going to quickly find yourself struggling to hit your goals.  So when we talk about strategy, what we're talking about is the plan.  You can't know WHAT to do with your marketing until you decide what the overall goal is.  Is the goal:

• For someone to follow you on social media?

• To opt-in to your email list?

• For them to purchase your product or service?

Before you ever start implementing your marketing actions, you need to make sure those actions point in the right direction.  Like I was saying before, a lot of business owners DO a lot of work, but then wonder why they're not seeing the results that they're looking for . . . and the reason is that their actions aren't making sense in the minds of the people consuming their content.

If people don't know what you want them to do, how are THEY supposed to know what to do?

When creating a marketing strategy, we like to first think of the end goal in mind.  So let's say we want people to book a call with us about our marketing services.  So the plan is to create campaigns and content with the ultimate goal of people booking this call with us.  After we've got our strategy in place, we like to work our way backward from that.

So if the goal is to book a call, what would be the step before that?  And before that?  We continue to do this until we get ALL the way to the beginning when someone first interacts with us and our brand.

These are what are known as marketing tactics.

If the strategy is the plan, then the tactics are the steps you take to implement that plan.

Now that you've decided what your goal is for your marketing, the next thing to ask yourself is: "What are all the steps my ideal customer needs to take in order to arrive at the goal of my marketing?"

While you might initially think this seems simple, it's really not.  Because if this was that simple, then every business would be getting the attention they want for their business, and we know that's not true.

The reason a lot of business owners struggle through this is that they don't take the time to create a map of steps that people will take, in an order that makes sense, ultimately arriving at that goal.

Most people either neglect this process completely or leave out key steps that disrupt the whole process.  Most business owners assume that they'll create a strategy, post social media content, and people will do what they want them to do.  I'm here to tell you that it's not that simple.

Most people are what we call logical buyers, which means they need to see lots of information from you and your business before they'll think about investing their hard-earned money, and rightfully so.  With so many scammers and people overembellishing their business results, people are a lot more careful online about who they buy products from and the services they hire them for.

This is why you see us put up so much personally branded content because when people get on a call with us, they already feel like they know us.  We're not strangers, we're Michael and Jill, the couple that I feel like I know.  This is one of our marketing tactics . . . to show people WHO we are along with WHAT we know.

So your homework coming out of this blog are simple:

• First, think about what the goal is of your marketing . . . what is the strategy that you want to implement?

• Second, jot down all the steps (tactics) it will take for someone to arrive at your end goal

If you need help developing your own marketing plan for your business, you can always reach out to us on Instagram @michaelandjill and we'd be happy to discuss building a custom marketing plan for you!