What's best for your Business...Strategic or Tactical Marketing?

Which would you rather be in your business: Efficient or Effective? If you're like most people, your gut-level response is BOTH of course! And you can be. But.... have you ever stopped to think which one needs to come first? Steven Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People said:

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at efficiently climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - with being very effective"

This is especially true when it comes to marketing. When your busy working on your business most people often make the mistake of "doing something, even if it's wrong", mistaking activity for effectiveness. It's easy to do in the real-time world of social media where everyone is looking for instant gratification in the technology world we live in. They get busy placing adds, buying lead lists, building a web presence, sending out mailers, attending networking events, creating brochures, and so forth. In other words, they get busy doing something and in this blog I'm going to talk about how to be efficient and effective while using both strategic and tactical marketing to your advantage so read on and enjoy!

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Now let's start with strategic marketing. It's important to realize that the strategic side of the coin - what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to - is always important than the marketing medium of where you say it. The is the basic difference between strategic and tactical marketing.

Strategic marketing embraces the thought process that occurs before your message is broadcasted to your audience. Seth Godin once said,

Marketing is not an emergency. It's planned thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn't end until you are done.

Strategic marketing starts with understanding who your customers are and what is important to them. You have to understand why they buy what they buy by seeing the world through their eyes. By understanding what's important to your target market, you can then put a strategy together that gets more qualified prospects to call, reduces your sales cycle, and increases for close ratios. Strategically, marketing programs and advertising should get the attention of target market prospects and facilitate their decision making. This lowers their risk for taking the next step in the buying process.

Examples of strategic marketing (what you say, how you say it, what you say it to):

• Market Research you did to determine a need for what you offer
• Customer feedback
• What your customers need to hear
• What your customers go to get information
• What value you will give to ensure they make the best decision possible

Now on to Tactical Marketing. Tactical marketing is the execution part of the plan, such as generating leads, placing media, creating marketing collateral, and implementing a great follow up system. In other words, it's the medium in which your message is delivered. to be effective, the strategy has to be in place first. Just putting a marketing message in an appropriate medium for your customers to hear or read is not good enough. The strategy must derive from an understanding of what's important to them. Otherwise, the tactical part of the marketing process will be much less effective, resulting in marketing programs that under- perform

Examples of tactical marketing (where you say it) Lead generators (to get your target market's attention):

• Social media
• Emails
• Speaking engagements
• networking events
• Marketing tools (to keep your target market's attention once you have it):
• Videos
• websites
• value based collateral such as DVD, eBooks, and other collateral that gives meat, NO sizzle

Your turn...

Where are you spending your time? When you take the time to develop a sound marketing strategy that speaks to your potential customer and the end result they would receive from your product or service will get you business - every time. This procedure will help you achieve success in your marketing plans every single time, for every kind of business. If you would like a complimentary business assessment of your marketing plan to allow me to work with you to show you where you've been spending most of your time. 

Remember...you can be tactically efficient but you need a sound strategy to be effective. Thanks for reading and I look forward to connecting with you soon.