Tactical Marketing

What Is Tactical Marketing and Tips On How To Develop A Tactical Marketing Plan

When it comes to hitting your business goals or objectives, you must consider strategy and tactics. Many people think that these synonyms mean the same thing but they are totally different when it comes to marketing.
If you’re aiming at building a successful business entity, you must understand the difference between strategic and tactical marketing and how they work.

Definition of Strategic and Tactical Marketing

Strategic marketing is the planning of the objectives of the business. The Strategy is the direction which a business intends to take to reach the ultimate goal.

Tactical marketing involves the actions to be executed to achieve the strategic goal of the business.

Marketing is a very important step that a business takes to create brand awareness and also to place their services and products in front of their prospects.

Whenever you are putting down your business marketing plans, strategic marketing definitely comes first. Strategic marketing takes the first position because it outlines the direction your company will take.

Strategic marketing is wide and is also a long term process.

Although these tactical and strategic marketing involves different activities, they don’t oppose each other but complement each other. You cannot build a successful business without using both the strategic and tactical marketing.

In this blog, we are going to expound further on tactical marketing and we will also look out for the differences between tactics and strategy. But before we go further, we will look at strategic marketing first.

Strategic Marketing

Strategic marketing approach aims at selling your goods until you reach a specific goal. Most business goals are; increasing company’s revenue, boost sales, segment the market and introducing a new brand.

A perfect example of strategic marketing would be maintaining or increasing the revenue of your company with minimal advertising of products.

Strategic goals are broad. However, as a business owner, you have to be very specific with your goals. For example, instead of just aiming at increasing sales, you can try to set a goal of increasing the sales on a specific percentage. You can also segment your market and aim at increasing sells in that specific market segment.

Tactical Marketing

Now that we have learnt something about strategic marketing, let’s dive in to the heart of this article; tactical marketing. Like we said earlier, tactical marketing involves specific tools and techniques which your business will utilize to meet it’s goals.

A tactical marketing plan involves:

• Business goals
• Marketing objectives
• Marketing strategies
• Marketing tactics A tactical marketing plan divides business goals to marketing objectives then involves marketing strategies and tactics to achieve the goals.

How To Build A Tactical Marketing Plan

STEP 1: SITUATION ANALYSIS

The first thing you need to do is to conduct a thorough situation analysis. You need to identify the opportunities for your business. These opportunities will help you come up with SMART marketing objectives. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Trackable

Situation analysis can differ in structure. However, a standard situation analysis for your tactical marketing plan will include:

• Business goals for 1 year
  This means revenue expansion, service and, development.
  
• Current Customers
  The size of your clientele, how you acquired them and all the agreements you have with your customers.
  
• Industry Position
  Your understanding of the market place.
  
• Marketing Efforts
  Your past and current marketing attempts including what worked and what failed.
  
• Target Audience
  Size of target audience, their geographical location and the audience you aim to attract and convert.
  
• S.W.O.T
  Strengths, weaknessess, opportunities and threats of your business.

STEP 2: MARKETING OBJECTIVES

You now have your situation analysis, you can use that information to cross-reference your business goals with your business strengtht to form specific, measurable, realistic and, trackable marketing objectives. Below is a good example of how marketing objectives can hold up your company’s goals:

Company’s goal: Expand services geographically
Marketing objective: Creating international awareness

STEP 3: MARKETING STRATEGY

Marketing strategy is the most important part of your tactical marketing plan. This is a very critical stage because without tactics a strategy is useless and without strategy tactics are a nightmare.

There is no need of carrying out the tactical part if there is no strategy because these two marketing plans go hand in hand.

In this stage, you must consider buyer funnels in 3 stages. These are:

1. Awareness

The ultimate goal of awareness is to let people know about your brand. In awareness, there are strategies that work perfectly well to increase brand recognition. These strategies are:
– Content marketing
– Event marketing
– Customer/Public relation

2. Consideration

The goal of this stage is to let your leads and potential customers understand the importance of your product or services. In consideration, you are explaining to your leads why they should consider your product or services over other options.

3. Decision

In decision stage, the goal is to turn leads into real clients. You can achieve this by using guarantees and paid advertisements. In this stage, the probability of seeing a ROI are high because the clients are aware of your brand.

Now that you have developed the stages of marketing objectives, you can move on to marketing tactics that you will execute.

STEP 4: MARKETING TACTICS

Your marketing tactics can be divided into two section, the ongoing and foundational tactics.

Foundational mainly relates with your website. Your website should represent your brand.

Ongoing tactics on the other hand are used distinctively over time.

SECTION 5: NEXT STEPS

After completing your tactical marketing plan, you have to execute the plan.
Stick to your tactical plan and don’t jump unto other plans even if they sound good.

Conclusion

Don’t make a mistake of using tactical marketing without first addressing strategic marketing. Most companies have made this mistake and they ended up failing miserably.

Start by working on your strategy then you can move on to tactics to drive massive growth on your business.

A strategy is a foundation of a successful business.