Developing a Marketing Plan for Your Box : Strategy vs. Tactics

Strategy vs. Tactics

Developing a marketing plan that actually works is no easy task. There are a lot of things out there that you could do, but how do you know which ones to do? In this post, we're going to go through a classic business concept and discuss strategy and tactics for Marketing.

Think of strategy as determining what to do. Think of tactics as determining how to do it.

Strategy:

• Carry out a counter attack
• Blitzkrieg
• Develop a promotional plan
• Drive more traffic online

Tactics:

• Hand out business cards at a networking event
• Put a bigger call-to-action button on your homepage
• Use title meta tags on all your website pages
• Include a URL in all your YouTube videos

You should focus on strategy before tactics. If you focus on tactics first, you might just be wasting your time and money. Using tactics at random seldom gets positive results. Your tactics should be part of your overall strategy. For example, putting a bigger call-to-action button on your homepage will be most effective if it’s part of a landing page strategy. That means setting goals, developing layout with conversion optimization in mind, writing great copy, doing A/B or Multivariate testing and using analytics to see the results and adjust. Think of tactics like putting pepper on the steak. It can definitely add some flavor, but it’s not the meat.

The first part of your strategy needs to be setting goals. If you don’t then you’ll be blindly trying to yield results for your business. You need to know why you are doing this.

If you know that you get 5 customers on average for every 1,000 visitors, then it may be wise to develop an SEO strategy because you know it will yield the results you want. Your goal could be to increase traffic by 25% within 6 months.

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