Marketing strategy is your overarching vision for how you will get from where you are now to where you want to be using marketing—basically, a general roadmap that doesn’t dive too much into the weeds about how that will happen.
Another way to think about marketing strategy is that it’s a list of your MESSY goals: it’s big, it’s bold as hell, and it’s simple—it shows you the field where those weeds are, but you’re not getting into ’em just yet.
Marketing tactics are the specific, detailed methods you’ll use on each step you take down that roadmap—these are all about hacking those weeds to bits, but in a very narrow sense (because you’re only focusing on one step at a time).
Do you need both? Definitely. Here are some examples to help you better understand the two.
Marketing Strategy—Your MESSY Goals
MESSY goals are:
- Mission-aligned
- Exponential and earnest
- Sifted from the heap
- Simple and memorable
- Uniquely yours
Here’s an example:
“We’re going to grow by 10x in the next two years while keeping profit margins steady by investing heavily in advertising.”
Now that’s pretty messy, if you think about it—how are we going to grow by such a huge margin? Advertising is a huge umbrella term—what kind of advertising? Where are we advertising? What are we advertising?
Ah ah ah! Not so fast—now we’re getting into those weeds we talked about earlier.
You see, the point of keeping a goal messy is to lay out a broad roadmap—basically just a direction and a goal.
However, we also want to make sure that our strategy is moving us in the right direction, so we need to align our goals with our PiPP: People, Impact, Process, Profit.
Every business is different, which means the things that matter most to you aren’t necessarily the same as anyone else. Most businesses value one or more of those 4 things. Your strategy needs to take that into account.
Achieving 10x growth will rapidly change a business and has the potential to cause major disruptions. Will you protect your people along the way? Or your processes? Or your profit margins? All of these things can morph (or even disappear in their current form) during growth of that magnitude.
So make sure, as you come up with your strategy and tactics, that you’re making sure the things you care about most when it comes to your business are protected along the way.
This is strategy. Now, we want to move into tactics.
Marketing Tactics Transform Your Strategy (Your MESSY Goals) into Reality
So, we know we want to grow by a huge amount, and we know that advertising is the way we want to do it, and we want to keep a few things safe as we do so, but… how?
It’s easy to say, “Let’s grow 10x!” But if the actual process of doing so was easy, everyone would be doing it.
That’s where tactics come in. Tactics are granular—they tell us exactly what to do to achieve our goal. For example:
“To achieve the overarching strategic goal of 10x growth via advertising, we’ll invest in the 4 major channels that we know our primary audience frequents: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Podcasts. We’ll spend x amount of dollars on each platform—here’s exactly what the ads will say and what they’ll look like…”
See the difference? Much more granular. Much more specific. Deep in the weeds.
But that’s how any goal is achieved—one step at a time down a carefully plotted path.
Merge Strategy and Tactics for Success
Sun Tzu famously said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
What he meant was this: if you have a good strategy, meaning your pointing in the right direction and moving toward a goal, you might get there eventually, but it’s going to take a long time…
Because moving in the right direction isn’t enough. You have to follow a precise path to get there efficiently.
After spending over a decade in marketing, I can tell you that the opposite really rings true as well—if you’re pouring money into some random marketing tactic and hoping it sticks, you’re basically just lucky if it drives you in what ends up being a good direction…
Because just as often as not, it can push you in the wrong direction. I’ve seen this more times than I can count—no strategy, no real goals, just pouring money into marketing and hoping for the best.
When I see people doing that, it feels like watching someone putting on a blindfold before picking up a bow and arrow. It doesn’t matter how powerful that bow is, how strong you are—if you’re pointed away from the target, you’re just not going to hit it.
That’s why we always recommend that our customers invest in a marketing strategy before we ever try recommending a single marketing tactic.
A custom marketing strategy makes it much more likely that your messy goals will turn into reality—in fact, without pure, blind luck, it’s the only way that happens.
Get a Custom Marketing Strategy to Get You to Your Messy Goal
No matter how nice it would be, there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy out there.
Which means you need something customized if you want to succeed.