Strategy Vs. Tactics: What Does Your Company Really Need?

Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics? Unless you’re in the military, the difference between the two words may seem semantic and meaningless for practical concerns. Both are ways to organize your efforts and energy towards a goal. However, the difference between the two couldn’t be more important, especially in terms of handling your business.

A strategy is the overarching framework and plan used to meet your goal. For instance, if your goal is to increase profits, you may want to look at updating your atmosphere for conversions of your website. This initiative – “Promote Conversions” – would be your strategy for improving profits. The tactics would be the individual actions you take in order to carry out that strategy. Maybe you’ll move your Call to Action button to a more prominent place on the website, or employ video in order to engage the customer so that they stay for a longer period of time. These tactics are relatively easy to change and switch in the face of incoming analytics and changing circumstances to your business’s industry, as opposed to your strategy, which should be more stable in the face of changes.

So, why the vocabulary lesson? As the New Year arrives, a lot of online business blogs  are publishing articles suggesting new online marketing “strategies” for your business to take on for 2016. And while many of these strategies can be truly beneficial to your business, you must also be aware that their solutions may not be what you actually need. Connecting with LinkedIn users through its Groups function and using Facebook custom audiences aren’t necessarily bad ideas– in fact, the social networks want you to use these features in a beneficial way so that other companies will follow your lead.  But these aren’t strategies – they’re actually tactics, methods you can implement, test and tweak to your heart’s content, but don’t say anything about your company’s individual and unique strategy towards an overarching goal.  Furthermore, they’re fads; a flavor of the month that the business blogs will grow tired of in two weeks before they start touting a new “world-beating” plan. Suffice to say, if you are lifting an entire strategy straight off a random internet article published within the past week, you either have A) lost your mind or more likely, B) lost serious confidence in your company’s current strategy, and you are now desperately looking for answers.

There is no way a random news editor or blogger will know exactly what you’re company needs in order to optimize its digital and online marketing strategy. Only you can truly discover what your company requires in order to take it all to the next level. The experts at Sun Sign Designs will be able to help bring out the true remedies of what your business requires, as we have done for many other clients before. Reach out to us today so we can help you bring your strategy into the New Year!