Lots of people like to divide the world up into two groups. There’s the classic glass-half-full or glass-half-empty example. Others divide the world into those who like to put the toilet paper so it goes over the roll and those who put it so it goes under the roll. There are people who can wake up after one alarm and those who need lots. The lists (and the fun Internet memes) go on and on.
Here at DemandBrew, we like to divide marketers into two groups: those who are more tactical and those who are more strategic.
Now a lot of the time, people mention strategy-and-tactics all in one breath, as if they were one thing. But they are really very different.
In the simplest of terms, your strategy is your long-term plan, while your tactics are the individual tasks you use to accomplish your long-term plan.
It might be easiest to understand the differences if you think about strategy and tactics in the context where those terms are most often used—warfare. Think about knights defending a medieval castle. Their tactics were things like pulling all the villagers within the fortress walls, having their archers shoot down at the enemy or pouring boiling oil on anyone who approached too close to the gate. Their strategy, the overall plan, was something like, “We’ll keep the invaders outside the castle walls until they run out of food and go home.”
As marketers, it’s really, really easy to get bogged down in tactical details. After all, we have a lot of things to do every day. We’re thinking about which campaigns we’re going to run in the upcoming quarter, we’re tracking our click-throughs and leads, and we’re looking for new opportunities that might be valuable. But when we focus too much on these tactical activities, the strategy gets lost.
We hate to say it, but most B2B firms today have a dearth of strategic leadership. In many cases, no one—in marketing or in any other department—is doing the big-picture thinking. No one is asking the important “why” questions: Why are we focusing on this particular target market? Why do we offer these particular products? Why do we price our products in this way? Why are we advertising in these particular media? Why do our regular customers continue to buy from us?
A few marketers are stepping up to ask those questions—and a lot of others. They are thinking about the business as a whole. They aren’t just tracking clicks and leads—they’re focusing on how marketing is impacting company revenue and ultimately profitability.
So which are you—a strategic marketer or a tactical marketer?
If you’re a strategic marketer, you’re going to feel very at home here at DemandBrew. If you’re still a tactical marketer but would like to become more strategic, take heart—making the change is easier than you think. To get started, check out the webinar titled “How to Be a More Strategic B2B Marketer.”
How to Be a More Strategic B2B Marketer
How do B2B marketers get beyond just "doing stuff" to make sure they're actually doing the right stuff? In this on-demand training webinar, learn what more strategic marketing leaders and teams are doing differently to get beyond the tactics and generate big results.
