Strategies vs. Tactics in Content Marketing

Entrepreneurs and C-level executives are often hailed as visionaries full of novel ideas that will benefit customers, and believed to possess the passion needed to achieve legendary success.

Many small business owners are trying to emulate that success, or at least expand their customer base to grow their business.

For each of these efforts, content marketing has emerged as a common approach with appeal to both small business and enterprise level companies.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Many companies are seeing great success with content marketing while others are not obtaining their desired results. There can be many reasons for this, but a key factor may be confusion between strategies and tactics. Understanding the difference between them can have a big impact on your business.

Understanding Strategies and Tactics

Strategies are the broad, fundamental plans that guide your business. They are big picture, ambitious and open-ended. Most importantly, strategies are based on enduring values that drive the operations of your company, creation of your product or provision of your service.

Strategies don’t change on a whim, if they change at all. Examples include:

• Pursuing meaningful client engagement
• Providing excellent customer service
• Hiring great talent and valuing their contributions

Tactics are used to implement strategy. They are specific methods deployed to achieve a desired result. Tactics are small detail, short-term and can change quickly. Strategies evolve but have solid values at their core.

Content Marketing Strategies and Tactics: Better Together

Strategies and tactics go hand and hand in the world of content marketing. Tactics are varied and could include:

• Earning links through meaningful website content
• Guesting posting on credible blogging sites
• Building a presence on third party review sites
• Raising your social media profile

Sometimes tactics yield exciting interim results. You may see a bump in website visitors, an increase in Facebook “likes,” or brief rise in sales.

However, tactics should not be the cornerstone of your plan for success. What works today might be ineffective tomorrow. Google changes its algorithm frequently to ensure end users are obtaining the highest quality search results. Technology advances rapidly and affects consumer behavior as demonstrated by the emerging dominance of mobile search.

Tactics can also conflict with strategies if the techniques you deploy go against your company’s core values. The web is littered with the remains of failed tactics like posting blog articles with spammy links, or web pages with disguised paid links.

How to Implement for Your Business

Businesses should use ethical tactics while they are effective but not overlook the values-driven strategies that are vital to a company. Strategy ideas include:

• Developing authentic content for relevant audiences
• Providing high quality content to authoritative websites
• Ensuring your company website is user-friendly, mobile-ready and content rich

Business owners usually have a vision for what they want to achieve with their product, service or company. A reputable search engine optimization (SEO) firm can help supplement strategies and recommend innovative tactics for generating organic search results, website traffic and conversions using content marketing.