Insights

I remember sitting in a meeting with a very competent CEO when he announced “our marketing strategy is to use pay-per-click”.

I bit my lip.

To a marketer like me, online advertising, social, Google ads etc. is a TACTIC, which is used as part of a STRATEGY to achieve an OBJECTIVE.  

Maybe I’m too much of a language buff, but there is a definite distinction between the words “strategy” and “tactics” when I use them in a presentation or document, even when there seems to be a blurring of the two in everyday discourse.

Let’s take a real world example:

Setting an objective

I will do a separate article on objective setting, because that is worthy of an discussion in itself, but on this occasion, the objective is to develop a new revenue stream for a business.

Deciding on a strategy

This is the crucial part. Ideas can come from marketing, sales, the leadership team, finance or operations. 

In this real world example there was service that the business’s contracts team could offer clients which had never been promoted. Preliminary research showed there was a potentially large market for this service. 

Tactics to support the strategy

There are numerous ways to employ tactics to support a strategy, on this occasion the tactics successfully employed included:

• Training of sales and customer service staff in the new service

• Sales collateral including a brochure, case studies and video

• A new SEO friendly web page which promoted the service and could also double as a landing page

• Articles published through trade journals and websites

and finally, this was where a pay-per-click campaign also came into the mix, as a TACTIC!