What’s the difference between a strategy and a tactic?
If you answered that a strategy is an idea and a tactic is an action or vehicle used to engage a strategy, bravo. If you didn’t, you just learned something.
I’ve been talking mainly strategies in this series. After all, these posts are all about how to build a strategic marketing plan for your business. As I close out the first season of the series, I’m opening the door to the follow-up second series, injecting discussion on tactics to help you develop the strategies you’ve discovered and reach your marketing goals.
As you consider the intimate marketing dance your customers do with your branding and marketing efforts—often referred to as the customer lifecycle—it can be helpful to lay out your programs and strategies in a linear chart like the one below.
The first column, listing objective-driven points in the customer experience, will define the coordinates locating a customer in the lifecycle. The second column lists the media, or vehicles, you will use to accomplish program goals. The third column lists the content, or what you will load into those media vehicles, to complete that part of the program.
Some tactics will be broadly relevant, proving their worth at every stop along the customer lifecycle experience. For our study company, Big Wood Ski, that might be the Big Wood Ski website. Other tactics will have more-limited relevance. Press releases, for example, may not deliver as powerful a punch, at least until brand awareness is solidly established. But hey, even Nike and Apple were once unknowns.
Here’s the chart for Big Wood Ski, designed to help this exciting new company earn the market share it deserves:
