This blog post by Chris Brown really hit home for me — as it should for most people working in marketing or communications.
Here’s how Brown puts it on her Branding and Marketing blog:
So often I’ll get a request from a company representative for a price on execution of a piece of marketing. A Facebook page. A website. Maybe a PDF brochure or a prospecting email.
All of these items are fine on their own. Marketing Tactics. A marketing tool that helps support marketing results.
But alone, without being in support of a goal, the tactic simply doesn’t work.
Yes and amen. Preach.
It seems that clients — whether internal or external — rarely think of strategy. They think of tactics. They want a brochure, a website, an e-newsletter.
As marketing and communications professionals, it’s our duty to help our clients think about strategy first.
I’ve said it before on this blog, but it bears repeating:
Put strategy first. Worry about tactics later.
It isn’t that complicated. Just start by answering these three questions:
- Who is your audience?
- What do you want to tell them?
- How do you want them to react?
(I expand on these questions a bit here. It’s a seven-year-old post, but worth reading if you have the time.)
From there, you can start looking at testing and tactics (another old post worth reading — part 2 of the post linked above).
Unfortunately, we get it backwards so many times. We start first with the tactics — the news release or email blast or brochure — then wonder why our efforts aren’t effective.
Let’s take a step back and do the hard but necessary work of answering those three simple questions. Let’s start with strategy.
Image via Blue Diamond Gallery.
Higher Ed Marketing 
Some great points here. We always preach this with our higher education clients. There’s a huge difference between tactics and strategies. Tactics should only be employed after the objectives, goals, and strategies have been laid out.