Strategy vs tactics

Strategy. It’s a big word (figuratively speaking). As marketers, we’re often focused on delivering results, which means the doing of things. Landing PR, increasing social media engagement, planning events. These are the results of tactics. Strategy is what guides those tactics and their use.

Clients (whether agency side or in-house) will often ask us for a tactic. Something they understand and can point at (PDFs are an in-house favourite and surefire win on the bingo game of my career). Yet, more often than not, there’s no definitive rationale backing up the request. Why a PDF? It’s an important question. But it’s not so easy to answer.

Strategy vs tactics

Marketing and communications strategy should be at the heart of everything we do. It’s a guiding plan that defines what we want to achieve, when, and why. Not how. How is the realm of tactics — the social campaigns, brand activations, and influencer partnerships.

The point is that business units — clients — are focussed on the how. Businesses as a whole are, invariably, considering the “what” and the “why”. Quite often the “where and when,” too. At a top level, there’s usually the same goal in mind: Increase sales by the end of the next financial year to deliver greater profits to investors and shareholders. A charity might be slightly different: Increase donations by the end of the next financial year in order to facilitate more giving while paying competitive salaries to staff. These broad strokes will, naturally, get refined.

Strategy follows an objective. Grow the business. Win the war. Sell more books. Own Twitter. There’s something tangible involved.

Let’s break it down into analogous humour and invoke the ever-reliable Douglas Adams, who wrote about the three phases of galactic civilisation: “…the first phase is characterised by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?”

The goal is not to die of starvation. The strategy is knowing that we must eat in order to survive. From there, we delve into tactics.

Tactics vs strategy

Not to be confused with sub-strategies (more on that shortly), tactics are the methods by which we follow our strategy to achieve our goals. Back to Douglas.

Our goal is to not die of starvation. Our strategy is to eat something by sundown so that we don’t die of starvation. Our tactic is to order a takeaway and have it delivered to us by a human on a motorised bicycle, thus not expending any unnecessary energy.

In reality, when your sales director asks for a product PDF and you say, “why?” or, more strategically, “what goal is the PDF there to serve?” you’ll be able to guide the answers with a little more clarity. What’s the sales strategy? Target audience? Market sector? It might well be the case that a PDF is the perfect tool for the job. Maybe an animation is. Or just a phone call. But even if the PDF is the right way to go, you’ll understand more about why it needs to be made and so design it appropriately.

It’s the equivalent of someone saying, “let’s order from a person on a bike” without giving any extra detail about food, levels of hunger, or time.

Sub-strategies

A tactical approach can have a whole strategy that goes along with it. We’ll come back from our hitchhiking to the realms of normality for this. Social media is a prime example.

Businesses often have a strategic objective to increase their brand presence in order to drive awareness and, therefore, sales. A tactic deployed ubiquitously is posting on social media. But what? Why? Where? When? There’s an entire discipline behind social media strategy that deals with these questions. This can be simple or complex. And it should always be based on research and audience personas — know who you’re talking to.

Sub-strategies are, importantly, never found in isolation. Your social media strategy must work with your content strategy and sales strategy. They function alongside one another, while primary strategies might well function alone, or at least act as a starting point.

A business strategy informs brand, sales, finance, and marketing plans. Those, in turn, dictate goals and approaches to the plans below them. One feeds into the other and back up the chain. Each with a set of defined tactics to achieve those end goals.

And so we come to the now less murky waters of strategy vs tactics. Which really is a bit of a misnomer. One doesn’t exist without the other. Rather, they’re sides of the same coin, shoes that belong on opposite feet, and other such metaphors that describe two things that are sort of independent but work together. The difference, however, is that strategy deals with what, where, when, and why while tactics address the how. It’s knowing you need to eat versus ordering a Deliveroo.

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