Don’t fall in the Tactic Trap

So you need to improve your marketing email engagement. Or your online sales. Or your brand recognition.

What’s the first thing you do?

If you answered something like changing your email format, creating a video campaign or starting a blog, you’ve fallen into what I call the Tactic Trap. It’s so exciting to list all the things you could do that you forget to make a strategy for what you should do.

Tactics vs strategies: what’s the difference?

Strategies are rooted in your business objectives and the problem you’re trying to solve. They’re complete ideas, based on data or research, about how you could achieve your goals. For example, a strategy could look like:

• Promote our brand in niche online communities
• Showcase how our customers are using our products
• Create opportunities for potential customers to try our product in-person

Tactics, on the other hand, are the workhorses that accomplish your goals. They’re the collateral you create that carries your message. Some examples:

• eBooks and whitepapers
• Search ads
• Facebook groups
• Testimonials
• Video campaigns
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Contests
• Sales or coupons
• Twitter chats
• Webinars

Tactics don’t mean much on their own. Sure, they do different things and have different strengths and weaknesses, but without a well-thought-out strategy to give them a direction and a purpose, chances are the ones you choose won’t be the best candidates for the job.

A deeper look at the Tactic Trap

Everything starts with a business goal. Let’s say you want more users to sign up to a subscription-based membership program.

From there, it’s pretty simple to come up with a few tactical ideas:

• Launch a contest to create hype
• Make a landing page that outlines the benefits of being a member
• Send an email blast to remind members that they’re eligible

Do these ideas tie back to your business goal? Check. Is there reasoning behind each one? Check.

But there’s something missing. Each idea makes an assumption about a customer problem you’re trying to solve. People aren’t thinking about membership. People don’t understand the benefits. People have forgotten that membership is even a thing.

Is all of this really true? If not, you might not get the results you were hoping for… and therefore might not be supporting that business goal after all.

What it boils down to is this: make sure you’re solving the right problem before you start thinking about those tactics. And they key to that is in creating a solid strategy first.

Put the outcome ahead of the output

The business goal should still kick this off, but it’s important to frame it with what your audience is doing today and what you want them to do tomorrow.

That means making a logical connection from business goal > problem > strategy > tactics, like this (with an arguably simplistic example):

Goal: Define exactly what your company wants to accomplish, and why it’s so important.

e.g. We need 10% of our users to sign up for our membership program to hit our annual target of $200,000.

Problem: Consider the audience this impacts, and what barriers are in their way.

e.g. Active customers are historically most likely to sign up, but many aren’t sure if membership is worth the money.

Strategy: Plan how you’ll remove those barriers.

e.g. Highlight how current members are enjoying the perks of membership.

Tactics: Figure out how you’ll put your strategy into action.

e.g. Include member testimonials in the checkout process.

This is a little bit of an exercise in thinking backwards: you want to consider the outcome of your marketing efforts first, and then think about how you’ll get there. But it works.

How does it stack up?

When we talked tactics first, we were so focused on our business problem that we missed a lot of gooey goodness in the middle. We didn’t investigate the problem, or think about how we would overcome it. In short: we hadn’t thought through our strategy.

And which ended with a better plan? The tactic in the second example directly supported the strategy, which directly spoke to the problem, which directly tied back with the goal. It’s a veritable chain reaction of marketing planning!

Now, this is a very simple scenario. As your problems are more complex, you’ll have multiple goals, problems, strategies and tactics that overlap and cross paths. That’s okay! The idea is the same.

Just keep working backwards and you’ll move forwards.