Do You Have a Marketing Strategy?

Is your marketing working for you? Do you have a lot of marketing tactics but not marketing strategy?  It’s probably because you haven't really grasped the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics.

There is a huge difference between your marketing strategy and your marketing tactics. Marketing tactics are the social media (Facebook, blogging, Twitter) that you are doing. But, they are NOT marketing strategies. They are the things that you do to support your overall marketing strategy.

To better understand the difference, let's define what your marketing strategy is and what your marketing tactics are and the difference between the two of them.

Marketing Strategy

Your strategy is what you plan to do and the goal that you’ve set to achieve by a specific time frame. It's what you want to happen.

Marketing Tactics

Your tactics are the things you will do in order to make sure you’re your marketing strategy or "goal" is achieved.

This is the time of year when you should be working on your budget and your marketing strategy for next year. So, you need to get clear on what your strategy is so that you know where you're going. Then, you can set plans to use the appropriate tactics to achieve your set goal.

Do not be too broad with your strategy and especially with your tactics. Your strategy should be as specific as possible so that you know if and when you've actually achieved it and can move on to the next marketing strategy you want to implement.

When it comes to your tactics you want to be very specific on how they will support the strategy. You don't want to just say that Facebook will be one of your marketing tactics. But, what specifically will you do on Facebook to make it a tactic that supports your marketing strategy. The more specific you can get then the easier it will be for you to implement everything.