Difference between Online Marketing Objectives, Strategies and Tactics
So can anybody tell what is the difference between marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics and how does each insure that your marketing is effective and gets results?
MARKETING OBJECTIVES are what you ultimately want your marketing to do for your business. In other words, what role does marketing play in the success of your business? Marketing objectives usually describe the number of customers you want, sources of revenue, and market share, just to name a few.
Take an Example: This XYZ organization had two objectives:
1. To double their membership in 2006.
2. To increase the percent of members who own small businesses offline.
MARKETING STRATEGY describes how you will use your money, time, people, and other resources to achieve your objectives. Some of the issues addressed by marketing strategy are: What markets do we want to be in? How will we reach our audience? What products and services will you offer? How do you want to stand out in the minds of your customers?
Take another Example: An issue that came up again and again for XYZ organization was “It’s difficult to describe what makes us different from others.” We had been trying but we just could not say it in ten words or less. On the other hand, everyone agreed “When the organization is right for someone, they almost always sign up after attending one of our events.” That is, experience with the group is one of their best marketing tools.
From a strategic standpoint, this meant:
1. Don’t spend time and money on approaches that require strong copywriting to be effective. This meant putting on hold any major changes to the website.
2. Time and resources should be focused on encouraging prospective visitors to either attend a live event or to give away part of your product a try.
To encourage prospects to attend a live event, XYZ organization should asked current members to invite people in their networks who were likely to appreciate what the organization had to offer-essentially. They chose a word-of-mouth marketing strategy to grow the membership in XYZ organization.
MARKETING TACTICS are the specific activities you do to fulfill your strategy.
Take another Example: Once they decided to focus on word of mouth marketing (as opposed to changing the website or redoing the brochure) this organization needed to come up with activities members could do. They created a simple “outreach” card which listed membership benefits, where to go for event information, contact information, and a coupon that gave a $20 discount to first time visitors.
Next they distributed cards with an emphasis on getting cards to members who tended to be “connectors” (people who had broad, diverse contact networks and who were enthusiastic proponents of group).
Other examples of established Online Marketing Tactics available are pay-per-click, banner ads, joint ventures, classifieds, article writing and so on.
Summarizing two final points here:
1. The Chinese general and philosopher, Sun Tzu said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.
To get results from your marketing, you need to employ strategies AND tactics. Companies that tend to get bogged in “analysis paralysis” are those that have good strategy ideas but fall short when it comes to executing tactics. Companies that overly emphasize tactics tend to “spray and pray”; by implementing random marketing activities that don’t support and reinforce one another. Without appropriate balance between strategies and tactics, you are likely to be wasting your marketing dollars.
2. It’s more important to set marketing objectives and strategies that you’ll use than it is to create ones that are profound and/or impressive. If your marketing objectives and
strategy are three sentences written on a legal pad, fine. As long as they support your goals for developing your business and as long as you take action to put your strategy into practice.
. 31 Mar 07 | Archive, Internet Marketing
