About 90 percent of our clients want to dive straight into tactics when they first start working with us. People already have ideas about what they want to focus on: building up social media numbers, pay per click, SEO, and so on. However, as you can probably tell from the fact that we are only starting to address tactics now, in the tenth podcast in this series, talking about any of these tools right from the beginning would be jumping the gun by several steps.
The dictionary definition of marketing tactics specifies that they are strategic actions taken to promote specific marketing goals, so there really is no way we can talk about tactics if we haven’t even established our goals. Having gone through all the steps from business plan to marketing strategy, we now can now start looking at the various tactics we have to hand, and deciding which of them are in line with marketing goals, and how we will implement them.
Tactics are about actions, not ideas
Of course, ideas are a big part of digital marketing, but by the time we get to talking about tactics, we have moved out of the space of concepts and into the realm of the tangible and actionable. This is what we mean when we talk about tactics: specific actions we can take to promote the strategies and ideas we have come up with during the planning stages: sending an email, posting on Facebook, executing a website design, writing a blog, etc. Tactics are the actions we take to execute a strategy. In the same way that a great strategy is not much use to anyone without a good tactical plan to implement it, tactics will not be as effective as they should be if they are not used in the service of a powerful strategy.
Once we’ve worked with a client to decide on a marketing strategy and marketing goals, we draw up a tactical plan (which we discussed in our previous episode), which lays out all the marketing tactics to be used in a specific campaign, and the time and manner in which they should be implemented. This is how we translate creative ideas into plans of action, and how we ensure that great marketing concepts yield real-world results for our clients’ businesses.
