Tactical marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on the specific ongoing tactics and techniques you use to promote your business. These are your individual plans of action, that cover everything from cookie-cutter press releases and email marketing to advanced SEO and PPC campaigns.
Tactical marketing plan is essentially a series of small, specific plans that you can use to promote your business. These plans are based on the needs of your customers and prospects, as well as the current trends in your industry.
What is Tactical Marketing Plan?
Tactical Marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on short-term, specific goals. It is a process of identifying the best way to reach your target market, and then executing a plan to get your message across as effectively as possible.
Tactical marketing is not only about reaching consumers with your message, but also about figuring out what kind of relationship you want with them. It helps you develop strategies that will allow you to build on past successes and improve upon future efforts.
Tactical marketing strategy is the practice of using a business’ resources to create a plan for reaching its target audience. A tactical plan can be as short-term as a single campaign or as long-term as an entire year of digital marketing activity. Tactical marketing strategies involves using existing resources, such as money and time, to reach specific goals. Tactical marketing doesn’t require much new investment, but it does require careful planning and execution to act as a successful marketing strategy.
Why is Tactical Marketing Important?
Tactical marketing is important because it allows you to reach your target audience with a customized, targeted message that they’ll be more likely to reach both your target customer. Tactical marketing can also help you avoid being one of the many companies that are drowning in the sea of content—and if you’re not careful, your message might get lost or even ignored.
Tactical marketing helps you build relationships with your customers by providing them with the information they want, when they want it. It’s an opportunity for you to show your customers that you understand their needs and are willing to go above and beyond what’s expected from a business relationship.
Tactical marketing efforts helps you stay ahead of the competition by providing valuable information about trends in your industry and what people are searching for. You can use this information to stay on top of what’s happening in your field so that you don’t fall behind when it comes time for an update or redesign of your website or other online presence.
What is Strategic Marketing?
Strategic marketing strategy is the process of identifying a company’s target market, determining how to reach that market, and deciding what products or services should be offered.
As the name suggests, strategic marketing is about long-term planning. It’s not just about deciding which product you want to manufacture or sell; it’s also about figuring out how you’re going to get it in front of the right customers at the right time. Strategic marketing helps companies understand how they fit into their industry and makes sure they’re offering something unique or otherwise valuable enough that people will be willing to pay for it.
Difference Between Tactical and Strategic Marketing Plan
A basic difference between strategic marketing and tactical marketing is that strategic marketing tactics is the planning of how things will be whereas Tactical marketing is the tactics you will implement to make things happen as per strategy.
So today if you want to touch a sales figure of 1 lac units per day, then it needs a marketing plan and strategic planning of increasing manufacturing, sales etc. However, the tactics will be an actual ground level plan of the type of promotions you want to implement, the type of sales guys you need, the distribution channel that you need to expand and the exact territories you are going to target chronologically. Tactical marketing is a short term strategy but one which helps you achieve the goals of long term strategy.
During the university years in business, we are taught about theories that we need to apply in order to make our business profitable, sustainable, reachable and widely recognized. We learn models, we learn tools, we learn techniques. Still, many business people nowadays confuse strategic marketing with tactical marketing as they don’t make the clear difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
By firstly taking into consideration the planning of the activities that are going to create your brand image, you lack the actual marketing plan which provides you with the direction of your business growth in relation to your competitors. You need to have a step by step tactical plan which helps you achieve your strategic target.
How Tactical Marketing Works?
Tactical marketing plan is not a one time process. It can be described as an ongoing set of marketing objectives and evaluations. It is a continuous process of marketing efforts to be improved depending on your strategies as well as on the demands of the market. Segmentation has an important role to play in tactical marketing. By doing the right segmentation and by carefully choosing the segments that you want to target based on your product/service characteristics, you can create profiles of your customers and identify exactly the most efficient techniques to target and convert them.
The most popularly rising techniques used in tactical marketing nowadays are social media, contests, give away’s, refer-a-friend programs as well as affiliate marketing. As it is an ongoing process, you can always improve your tactics by using things like marketing automation, depending on your results. But it is essential for your marketing manager not to jump directly on the tactical part before primarily considering and focusing on the strategies that will develop and sustain your business. You need to have the background plan ready before you start thinking on tactics to achieve the plan.
“Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you are done.” – Seth Godin.
The above quote says it all. As per Seth godin, marketing is a slow and steady process and strategies need to be formed carefully and implemented over a period of time to get the best out of the market. This implementation of strategies is done by tactical marketing.
Example of Tactical Marketing
One very good example is Dansk Solar Energy, which went bankrupt after focusing on promoting their business and creating more brand awareness without initially focusing on what to say, how to say it and who to say it to. They jumped directly on where to say it to. And the list with such example can go on and on, but generally it is more frequent for the small companies and enterprises, which lack the necessary skills for the strategic marketing or the relevant experience in conducting the business.
Prior to any activity concerning tactical marketing, a true business man has to get involved in market research, competitive intelligence, focus groups, all being related to the strategic marketing. He needs to have an idea of what is happening in the market. Determining what your customers need to hear and where are they going for information is what is going to provide you with the necessary strategies to apply in the tactical market. To remember again that strategic marketing means the ideas, whereas tactical marketing means the action of implementing the ideas.
Placing media, creating marketing tools, advertising, community building, sales promotions, online advertising, radio, television, print marketing and implementing a follow up system are just some of your options in regard of the tactical marketing, which have the purpose of communicating the desired brand image to your target market and to inform them about your presence in the market. However, the activities planned for your tactical marketing should mainly be based on your strategic marketing in order to be cost effective and profitable.
How to Build a Tactical Marketing Plan?
Building a tactical marketing plan is an essential step in making sure your tactical marketing focuses on your brand getting noticed. Let’s now see how you can build a tactical marketing plan to reach all your marketing goals.
1. Know the goals
Every plan should start with a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. So before you start building your marketing plan, take a moment to think about the big picture: why are you doing this?
2. Prepare the budget
Once you’ve determined what your goals are, it’s time to prepare your budget. Make sure that your budget has enough room for all of the elements that will be needed for success, including the cost of hiring an agency or freelancer, any expenses related to print materials like brochures and flyers, as well as social media posts and ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
3. Map your marketing strategy
Now you will have to map out your overall strategy, including your goals and objectives for the next year. This will help you determine what you want to focus on in terms of content creation, customer acquisition and retention, and other key areas.
4. Execute your marketing plan
Next, you need to put together an execution plan that covers everything from the types of content you’ll create to how you’ll publish it across different platforms. You should also consider how much time you can dedicate to each piece of work (e.g., blog posts) and whether there are any additional resources needed (e.g., additional writers).
5. Gather your customers’ feedback
The final step in a tactical marketing plan is gathering feedback from your customers. Without this step, it’s impossible to know whether or not your marketing efforts are successful—or even if they’re working at all! You can gather this feedback in several ways: customer surveys, interviews with sales reps and staff members who interact with customers on a daily basis, focus groups, etc.
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Very good article ..very well explained with proper examples…Thank u!!