Like military campaigns, marketing campaigns require both clear strategy and strong tactics. Without a strategic framework, it’s doubtful your efforts or objectives will produce meaningful or desired results. Without smart tactics, it’s doubtful they’ll produce much engagement or interest. No general can afford to neglect strategy or tactics. Neither can a business owner. So, what is tactical marketing? How does it promote your long-term goals? Most of all, how does it help you build campaigns and win customers?

What is Strategic Marketing?

If tactical marketing is the tip of the spear, strategic marketing is the power and ambition behind it. It analyzes market trends, customer behavior, and your company strengths in order to identify threats, opportunities, and advantages. By sizing up the market and the competition, it shows you how to harness your assets and edge out your rivals. A strong strategy provides:

  • Clear Direction. Once you know the lay of the land, you’ll know how to marshal your forces for a decisive push. Coordinated marketing efforts fortify each other to achieve dramatic results.
  • Shrewd Resource Allocation. Industry research helps determine the best line of attack, ensuring staff and resources are deployed only where they’ll generate the biggest returns.
  • Measurable Results. Strategy not only provides guidance, but a series of quantifiable benchmarks to help you see where you’re gaining ground and where you’re falling short, so you can adjust accordingly.
  • Brand Consistency. A brand is more than a name. It’s the emotions, concepts, and perceptions people associate with it. But allowing your marketing team to advance in random directions makes it impossible for customers to understand who you are or what you stand for. Strategy does the opposite, ensuring every action reinforces your public image.
  • Customer Insights. It’s not enough to understand your products and services. Successful marketing relies on understanding your customers as well. Are they young, old, single, married, educated, sophisticated, street smart? What are their preferences, motivations, and pain points? Are they stable or still evolving? Once you’ve scouted their tastes and backgrounds, you’ll know which tactics are most likely to keep them engaged.

What is Tactical Marketing?

While strategic marketing sets goals, tactical marketing puts boots on the ground. It’s the short term actions and objectives necessary to fulfill your long-term ambitions. There are two types of tactical marketing:

  • Foundational. Anything that affects your brand’s reputation and values, such as your website, social media profile, and customer reviews. These parts of your marketing plan are long-lasting, but require frequent updates to stay relevant.
  • Ongoing. Anything generated for a specific campaign, such as a blog post, digital ad, or promotional video. While foundational content is evergreen, ongoing content is situational and time-sensitive.

Building a Tactical Marketing Campaign

When properly executed, marketing tactics maximize the value of every customer touchpoint in the shortest amount of time. Tactical marketing focuses on ground-level operations, turning strategic goals into successful campaigns. Tactical marketing teams:

  • Collect User Data. To create personalized content, marketers gather information about their audience. This may include their name, email address, purchase history, or browsing behavior ‒ anything that gives insight into their identity, interests, and behavior.
  • Identify Market Segments. Dividing customers into groups focuses your marketing efforts. Once you know your audience, you can create better experiences, generate more sales, and discover new ways to promote your business.
  • Craft Content. Blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, infographics, and social media posts can be used to boost rankings, increase visibility, capture leads, generate sales, and attract potential customers.
  • Select Communication Channels. Studying customer data tells you not only who your audience is, but how to reach them: SMS, email, digital ads, social media, etc. Application of this type of first-hand knowledge allows you to focus your marketing efforts to ensure the largest possible return for the time, money, and effort invested.
  • Build Landing Pages. A homepage is your digital HQ, but some campaigns require an advanced outpost to turn visitors into paying customers. While homepages educate visitors, landing pages convert them, with specialized graphics, copy, and calls-to-action.

YPM Tactical Marketing

Master of both strategy and tactics, YPM marketing campaigns create strong foundations for future growth. We turn goals into action, enlisting data, content, and web design to expand your customer base and capture larger market shares. Contact us today to learn how we can help turn your business into a dominant force within your industry.