If you want to be a successful online marketer, you have to understand the difference between strategy and tactics. This is an important distinction to make because many rookies think that the two words are synonyms. This confusion results in a random approach to marketing. Without a comprehensive marketing system, it is difficult to increase sales volume.
In essence, strategy is an overall view of your marketing plan while a tactic is the individual things you’ll use to market your business. A strategy is analogous to a war while a tactic is analogous to a battle. Although you might lose a few battles, you can still win the war if you win more overall battles or the win the most decisive ones.
How to Develop a Marketing Strategy
Developing a marketing strategy begins with understanding five fundamental things:
- The features and benefits of your products and services
- The most attractive way to package products or present services
- The best price points to sell your products
- The most cost-effective and efficient way of distributing your products or sharing your services
- Deciding on what software to use to coordinate all your business projects
Once you understand these fundamentals, then you’re in a position to figure out how to launch your promotions. Your plans on how how you’re going to promote your business will form your strategy. The purpose of a strategy, or plan of action to achieve your goal, will be successful if you focus on meeting your customer’s needs, test prices until you find the sweet spot, and fine-tune your series of tactics. Through iterations, you’ll eventually find what marketing mix works for your brand.
How to Develop Marketing Tactics
Your tactics include all the individual things you can do to make your plan successful.
While some of your tactics will focus on ways to improve conversion by figuring out the best way to optimize your landing pages and sales funnels to increase conversions, most of your tactics will focus on choosing the most effective channels to increase traffic to your website.
These traffic-generating tactics will fall into two distinct groups: push marketing tactics for paid traffic sources and pull marketing tactics for free traffic sources.
Push Marketing Tactics for Paid Traffic
Push marketing drives people toward your website. It’s also known as interruption marketing because you interrupt somebody’s online activities to redirect them to your website.
The most popular forms of push marketing are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Ad Space, and Ad Marketing.
Google Ads are Pay Per Click (PPC) ads placed on the right side of Google’s search results pages. Facebook Ads work in a similar way, with ads placed on Facebook pages. Both traffic sources work well, provided you learn how to choose the right keywords, accurately target a niche audience, and avoid blowing through your advertising budget.
Ad Space is about buying a banner space or text link on a popular website in your niche. Ad Network is similar, except you’re not buying a banner space or text link on a single website but on an advertising network like Chitka or Adbrite.
Pull Marketing Tactics for Free Traffic
Pull marketing attracts people to your website. It’s also known as attraction or magnetic marketing because your website provides some beneficial information to enrich the lives of your target audience.
Pull marketing starts by creating high quality content that you can then broadcast through blogs, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, forums, online groups, and YouTube channels.
While each of these channels work slightly differently, they all accomplish the same thing, putting your content out there for people to consume.
SEO will help you get traffic from search engine results pages, social media from social media pages, and YouTube from your video channel viewers. Meanwhile, forums and online groups will help you build relationships through conversations. Finally, blogs serve multiple purposes: they provide content to inform the reader, encourage interaction through the comments section, and prompts social sharing through social media buttons.
Winning the Marketing Game
While a strategy will give you a sense of direction, tactics will help you increase sales. While some marketers champion one form of traffic generating tactic over another, both push and pull marketing work well.
Consequently, you should use a little of both since each serves a different purpose. Paid traffic will give you short-term results through push marketing tactics like advertising, while free traffic will give you long-term results through pull marketing tactics like content creation.
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