Strategy vs. Tactics

What a colleague told me in 2009

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

At a retreat I attended in 2009, a colleague pointed out I was more of a tactician than a strategist. At the time, I felt slightly offended by this comment because I believed that strategists operated at a higher level than tacticians.

Over the years, I've come to realize he was right. This doesn't mean that I don't know or understand strategy—I do, and I help my clients with marketing strategies.

But where I get my juice is from creating the plan for implementing the tactics that enable the strategies to succeed.

Strategy is the overarching plan or approach designed to achieve long-term goals. It’s the big picture, the roadmap that guides your business towards success. Think of strategy as the "what" and "why" of your marketing efforts.

Tactics are the specific actions or steps you take to execute your strategy. They are the "how" and "when" of your marketing plan. Tactics are the practical methods and tools you use to achieve the strategic goals.

You cannot have one without the other.

So, let's say you want to boost your online visibility to grow your audience (strategy).

Your objective is to increase online visibility, which will attract and engage a larger audience and ultimately lead to more clients or customers.

Your tactics to achieve your objective might include:

• Content marketing

• Social media engagement

• Search engine optimization

Once you flesh out what you want to generate for each high-level tactic, start with the low-hanging fruit. 

For example, before you create new content, conduct an SEO analysis of your existing blog posts to enhance and optimize the content.  

Use your AI tool of choice with a prompt like this, for example:

Example Prompt: 

"Review this blog post [insert URL] and suggest improvements to increase its SEO value."

This will save you loads of time and give you a list of action items to implement to support your goal of boosting your visibility.

Rinse and repeat with every tactic you want to implement. AI is a useful and time-saving tool that helps you identify the tactics to support your strategy and then implement each one.

What do you think? Is this useful? Please reply or comment and let me know.

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This is free, pre-launch content. I initially published it as an email to my audience. I appreciate the vote of confidence from all the early adopter subscribers!