Marketing Strategy vs Tactics: What’s the Difference & Why It Matters

Strategy and tactics are commonly used words when it comes to marketing, and are sometimes thrown around almost interchangeably. However, important as they both are, marketing strategy and marketing tactics are not the same thing. Businesses that do treat them as one and the same often find it harder to see the results they were hoping for from their marketing investment. For any marketing initiative to be successful, it needs both a strategic and tactical approach, so in this article, we will explain what both concepts mean, how they differ, and how best to align them for success.

What Is A Marketing Strategy?

Put simply, a marketing strategy is your ‘big picture plan’, or the long-term vision for the goals you want to achieve for your business through marketing. Your strategy is the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind your marketing investment. In other words, why are you doing what you’re doing, and what are you trying to accomplish? Building a marketing strategy focuses on defining your ideal customers or buyer personas, anticipating their needs, and positioning your content in a way that communicates genuine value.

What About Marketing Tactics?

Marketing tactics are the other side of the coin – the specific tools and actions you need to bring your strategy to fruition. Marketing tactics are the ‘how’ of your plan; short-term moves designed to achieve short-term goals, such as running a time-limited social media advertising campaign, nurturing customers through drip feed emails, or optimising blog articles for higher Google ranking.

Your marketing strategy is the destination, while your tactics are the map to help you get there. Without a clear marketing strategy, many businesses use piecemeal tactics that are ineffective, difficult to measure, or misaligned with their end goals, so they waste money and fail to get the results they want. On the other hand, even the best marketing strategy won’t go far without the appropriate mix of tactics, channels, and actions to bring it to life.

How Marketing Strategy And Tactics Work Together

Recognising the crucial difference between marketing tactics and strategy is important because it allows you to focus your money, time, and efforts where they really matter. Businesses that don’t do this often fall into random acts of marketing, jumping between approaches, tools, and platforms without any real guiding strategy or commitment. Instead, businesses with a strategy and the tactics to implement it find that they are able to work smarter as well as harder, aligning every marketing expenditure and action with a clear purpose.

Benefits Of This Include

Better Resource Allocation

By defining a clear marketing strategy, you can keep your time, budget, and team efforts aligned towards the tactics that best support your goals, i.e. no more wasting money on efforts and ideas that don’t deliver a clear return on investment (ROI).

Better Monitoring And Measurement

When your marketing strategy and tactics line up, it’s easier for you to track which initiatives are working (or not), and make objective, data-informed adjustments in real time.

More Consistent Output And Results

SMEs with a strong marketing strategy find it easier to maintain consistent content output and messages across all of their marketing channels, building stronger brand recognition, customer trust, and credibility.

Find Out More

By understanding and being specific about what you want to achieve from marketing, e.g. increasing Christmas sales, boosting software subscriptions, or growing your revenues by 25%, you’ll find it simpler to create a cohesive tactical plan to achieve your goals. By doing so, you’ll find yourself approaching every investment and effort in terms of how well the tactic helps you accomplish your strategy, and if the answer is ‘no, ’ it gives you the space to rethink it.

At JDR, we provide a range of strategic and tactical marketing support services for small businesses. If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch today by calling 01332 982198.