When you need to market your business, it’s easy to learn about certain tactics and want to try them, thinking you’ll find immediate success. However, trying tactics here and there without long-term goals will not lead you to consistently favorable outcomes.
Instead, it's essential to have a robust marketing strategy: a business plan that details your business's objectives, ideal buyers, and processes for long-term marketing initiatives. At Mid-West Family, we see a lot of companies looking for tactical marketing ideas that offer quick fixes and upswings in customer conversions.
But to succeed with consistent, predictable growth, your company needs a marketing strategy. Let’s dig into marketing tactics vs. marketing strategy so you know what to prioritize.
What Really Matters: Marketing Strategies or Tactics?
First, it's vital to delineate the differences between marketing strategies and tactics. At its core, a marketing strategy is your company's game plan for finding and converting leads into customers and improving brand awareness. It establishes your goals, audiences, objectives, and how you will measure progress along those plans toward your goals. Marketing tactics, on the other hand, are ideas for how you might implement or improve those plans.
While small, actionable details can impact your business, tactics alone don’t work if you don’t have a marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy is an irreplaceable part of organizing and implementing your marketing efforts.
Why Use Marketing Strategies Over Tactics?
Actionable tips are still appealing, and we understand that. Implementing SEO into your website is a crucial tactic. Still, we urge all businesses to develop — and stick to — a custom marketing strategy so you can focus on long-term business goals.
So, your marketing strategy will include SEO, website development, content, and paid search ads – making SEO one of the many reasons your website shows up first on search engines. If you focus on SEO alone, your efforts won’t go as far.
Here are some specific reasons businesses see better results when prioritizing strategy over tactics.
Create a Long-Term Big-Picture Plan
Almost every marketing plan requires time to build traction. More than that, different seasons require different marketing approaches with varying prep times. For example, consumer-facing businesses often benefit from focusing their marketing efforts in Q4 to capture holiday sales, with content creation and material orders taking place in Q3.
But your business can't operate this way if you don't have a long-term plan outlining what needs to happen and when.
Also, long-term plans provide a course for your business's growth. Instead of trying endless marketing experiments and moving from one project to the next, you can arrange your ideas in a manageable plan that builds momentum and schedules different goals for when they become most viable. You can also build incremental successes and growth over time.
Allocate Resources Efficiently
Budgeting is one of the top concerns for marketing teams. For example, paid ad campaigns cost money for every impression or click, and content creation requires time, expertise, and even third-party assistance. Without a plan, your business might spend too much in the first quarter of the year and not have enough for the holiday shopping season. In fact, without a marketing strategy, your team might not even know how much spending is too much spending.
Maintain Forward Momentum in the Right Direction
No marketing journey moves in a straight line. Content marketing, for example, often requires at least six months to see traction — and more in a competitive industry. Paid ads can provide immediate results, but only for as long as you infuse your campaigns with cash. Unless you have an overarching plan that allows for these very different courses, you might let your content marketing efforts lag in the third month or hold onto paid ads as your only lifeline.
A marketing strategy also prepares your team for what to do when things go wrong. Your next paid ad campaign may have a lot of costly clicks without very many conversions, and your influencer campaigns may not work at all. A marketing strategy with objectives, goals, and KPIs helps your team objectively assess progress and know when it's time to let projects go or when they're hitting predicted snags.
Build Up Your Brand
Marketing strategies don't just include goals and processes but also your company's core branding assets, style guides, and other resources that keep your marketing consistent and recognizable across different platforms. This is crucial for building long-term brand awareness. When every element of your messaging strikes the same tone, you have a more lasting impression on your audience.
Marketing Strategies Matter — Start Creating the Right One with Mid-West Family
Without a long-term marketing strategy, marketing tactics don't matter. That's why our team at Mid-West Family focuses on helping small and local businesses create marketing strategies for direction and growth.