Marketing Strategy vs Tactics: What's the Difference?

The words strategy and tactics are often used interchangeably, but they do have different meanings in marketing.Many marketers have a goal, but they often lack an overall marketing strategy for achieving it. As a result, they go straight from goals to tactics and miss out on the strategy that lies between.

Basically, there is a clear order that your marketing strategy and its tactics have to follow in order to achieve your goals. Keep reading to learn more about the difference between strategy and tactics—and most importantly—how they work together to help you get the results you need.

The difference between marketing strategies and marketing tactics

A marketing strategy is a set of choices that shows how you’re going to reach your target audience and engage them. Plus, it demonstrates how these efforts will contribute to reaching your marketing—and business—goals.  Having a marketing plan is crucial!

Marketing tactics are the specific activities you use to execute your strategy. Digital marketing strategies have potentially hundreds of tactics such as posting curated content on social media, publishing blogs to increase website visibility, using backlinks to improve search engine ranking, and a Facebook ads campaign that targets specific buyer personas. You can even have tactics within tactics (a website or brand refresh is made up of several smaller tactics to tweak and enhance the final result).

A marketing goal is the specific target you want to reach. A business goal is the overall result you hope to achieve when you reach your target. Your marketing strategy is your map, and your tactics are the pieces of equipment that help you get there.

Marketing strategies and marketing tactics are both important for achieving a single goal.

As you can see, marketing strategies and tactics don’t oppose each other. In fact, they’re interdependent and have to complement one another for successful marketing.

Always start with your strategy and then add the tactics you need to get it underway. 

If you understand how marketing strategy, tactics, goals, and how the three link up, you will be able to launch a marketing campaign that has real commercial value. Always remember that building a marketing strategy around your marketing goals and business goals is the first step to achieving success. Then introduce the tactics needed to execute your strategy and achieve your goal.

Conclusion

If you’re running complex multichannel campaigns with many moving parts, we’ve got some useful tips for you about how to develop an effective integrated marketing campaign.

Remember that your marketing strategy is not a top-down process. Employees at every level will have ideas, suggestions, and observations that can contribute to the success of your marketing plan. It’s vital to have open communication channels in order to receive feedback, optimize your tactics and make sure everyone on your team understands the overall strategy.

Linking the results of your tactics to the effectiveness of your marketing strategy can be tricky and this is exactly why we created our tooll: so that you can track the progress of your entire marketing campaign in one place.

Book a free demo today and see for yourself how to use your media data like a pro to achieve your goals!