Don’t confuse strategy with tactics

Saving Money

These days, saving money is just as important as making it: these are times of austerity, as the government of the day likes to call it. Slight digression; the previous government’s favourite word was prudence, poor girl, yet neither word gets a look in in normal everyday speech. Weird: Victorian buzzwords. Digression over. Yes, saving money. Or at least not wasting it. When it comes to marketing, if you’re not thinking clearly, then wasting money is easy; in fact, the less clearly one thinks, the more money one can waste.

What’s The Goal?

The first thing that needs to be established is the business goal or objective that needs to be achieved. This is fundamental to the strategy, but if that sounds blindingly obvious, then you’ll be surprised at just how many people in company authority - not normally trained marketers, it must be said, but there have of course been exceptions – have bought an ad in their trade rag simply because it was cheap. Wrong; don’t do it, unless it’s on the schedule.

Who's The Target

The strategy should include a carefully thought out plan of what area of the marketplace has historically been a good hunting ground for the sales team, or where to find and exploit a new opportunity. In other words, what is most likely to give you the best return on the marketing investment. Yes, I said investment, and I say it regularly as that’s what marketing is supposed to be, not buying cheap, ad hoc ads that don’t generate any return at all.

Tactics

Tactics are the planned execution of the strategy: specifically where and how much to spend - advertising? press relations? direct/eMarketing? Should we get involved in corporate sponsorship (see strategy, really)? Once we've divvied this up for each month, should we keep a contingency just in case the boss buys another cheap ad?

So now you know how much you’re going to spend each month, where and on what and a little bit left on the side for management impulse buys. Now you can get down to the work of rolling out your marketing plans. Easy, isn't it? If the answer is no or maybe, then give us a call for some pointers.