Why Tactical Marketing Fails—Far Too Often

I’ve facilitated a lot of marketing strategy sessions over the years. They’re one of my favorite types of meetings to facilitate, because as a strategist, they’re how I gain some of the most valuable insight, especially early on in an engagement with a client. In fact, I generally call these “listening sessions.” You know the social media trend? It’s very we listen and we don’t judge. 

Inevitably as I start asking questions meant to steer us toward strategy, I get answers about tactics. “We need to be posting on LinkedIn more.” “We should be doing Google Ads.” “We need a new brand video ASAP.” 

Again, we listen and we don’t judge. The problem is, my question in answer to all of these tactical judgments is: “How do you know?” 

How Do You Know?

“How do you know?” is a powerhouse question in a strategists’ arsenal.

Marketing and brand strategy is the art and science of combining tactics (campaigns, channels, and assets) with hypotheses (KPIs) aimed at achieving desired results (goals). In other words, to belabor this science analogy, we strategists are in charge of reverse engineering a desired outcome through trial and error, and our KPIs are generally a stated hypothesis: We think boosting traffic to this landing page (KPI) will result in higher sales of this product (goal).

The problem is, many marketing teams think in terms of tactics and have never ventured a hypothesis. They’re focused on producing LinkedIn content without asking: is our audience here? Is our content answering their questions? Is this in any way connected to our overall goals? Do we know what are our goals are? 

So when I’m leading a marketing strategy listening session, I tend to push my clients upward to a higher level view: steering away from tactics and toward our goals. Tactics are, unfortunately, one of the most visible parts of marketing: every single member of the team sees those LinkedIn posts, it seems like. They see the competitors’ LinkedIn posts all day. They see the tactics—and none of the underlying strategy—and focus on that tip of the iceberg. 

The reason this tactics-first marketing tends to fail is because there is no underlying strategy—no one has answered, or even asked, “How do we know this will work?” 

And because no one has asked the question, frankly, they won’t even know if it’s not working. 

Strategy = Roadmap

Strategy is often a function of trial and error—it’s true that the reverse engineering could include some faulty logic somewhere along the line. It could turn out that our KPIs are all up and our goals are still not achieved, meaning we didn’t find the right efforts to put our time, energy, and budget toward. But strategy is also a function of measuring—if we never decided what to track or what our goals are, we don’t know if we’re headed in the right direction or way off the map. 

Another analogy I overuse and you’ve certainly heard before: strategy is your roadmap. You have to decide on a destination first (goals), then your route (KPIs), then your mode of transportation (campaigns, channels, assets—tactics). Plenty of things can go wrong on any roadtrip: you could find that your vehicle just isn’t up to the task and the weather is bad. You might learn that you’re working off an old map, and your route is blocked or under construction and no longer leads to your destination. You could find that you don’t have enough fuel to get there in the first place. 

But if you’ve never decided where you’re heading, you can drive around aimlessly for years, never realizing you’ve been making a great big repeating circle.