Tactics are important, obviously – they’re the part where stuff gets done – but they have to work for you, and not the other way around.

I’m just gonna come right out and say it: start-ups and scale-ups doom themselves with well-intentioned, but dangerously stifling, overemphasis on marketing tactics.

And I’m not going for hyperbole here. I mean the literal meaning of doom: “to make certain the failure or destruction of”.

In this post, my goal is threefold:

• to highlight this issue, so you’re at least aware and can be on-guard
• to provide you with some ‘tests’ to see if you’re in danger
• to suggest some corrective actions

The Noise Before Defeat

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu

For a decade or so, I’ve regularly attended the local (Kitchener and Waterloo) marketing-related peer-to-peer groups, and one thing that really, truly scares me is how these sessions reveal – either through requested topics or through audience discussions/Q&A – an over-focus on tactics.

(and don’t get me wrong, I love these meetups and appreciate all the time and work that goes into them…I’m always learning)

A lot of these sessions deal with using and optimizing tactics (e.g., video, digital) at an execution level; a lot of the questions are about what tools people use, and what metrics they track. So it’s clear that tactics are at or near the forefront of how local tech companies think about marketing.

Tactics are valuable, learning about them is important, and being blinded by them will doom your business.

Tactics are valuable, learning about them is important, and being blinded by them will doom your business.

And before I go on, here’s another piece of context (that you already know, but is nevertheless worth pointing out): as a start-up or scale-up, you don’t have years to figure things out. You have a very short runway in which you need to hit a trajectory of sustainable, long-term growth. So please keep that in mind, because a major problem with tactics is that when they’re used poorly, they create enormous, sneaky waste – in resources and time.

As a start-up or scale-up, you don’t have years to figure things out.

Tonight on Fox: Tactics Gone Wild

Starting with tactics is fast, easy, and accessible, and I think that’s why many companies take the plunge too deep, too fast.

You’ve started a company, you have a website, you already or eventually will sell something (e.g., a product, a service), and you need people to know about it. So you start doing the socials, and trying a bit of paid search, and playing with landing pages, videos, and emailers (and grumbling about CASL).

Just dipping your toe in the tactical pool gives you data: precious data that starts to steer your decisions and investments. A little more here, a little less there, change this word, move that opt-in, add a gate.

You optimize for a while – maybe even a long while…and maybe even years – just by living in and playing with the data.

Things are OK, until they aren’t.

And things are OK, until they aren’t: the effectiveness drops off, you get diminishing returns, you find yourself fretting and focusing on what little tweak you can make today to improve your tomorrow.

And all the while, you don’t realize that you’ve missed larger opportunities. The opportunity cost of your tactical focus was a lower ceiling on your company, and maybe a complete and devastating failure to reach escape velocity. That short runway ran out, or didn’t give you enough speed to really take off.

All Our Tactics Were Right, so What Went Wrong?

Tactics are dangerous because lots of things can go wrong, without you even really knowing, or – even more insidiously – with you being blissfully certain of success.

The Order was Wrong, so Effort was Wasted

Maybe you actually were effective, but were you as effective as possible?

Tactics, even when seemingly effective, can be extremely wasteful for your company when they’re not in support of strategies that, in turn, exist in pursuit of clear objectives.

Without a top-down Objective→Strategy→Tactic approach, companies spend all this time and money optimizing tactics that are, ultimately, somewhat ineffective because they aren’t aligned in pursuit of anything meaningful.

So you stay busy, but that’s not the same as being effective. And maybe you actually were effective, but were you as effective as possible? If your tactics weren’t part of a larger plan, then almost certainly not.

The Short Term Dominated, the Long Term Suffered

Companies get incredibly myopic because tactics are wonderfully distracting – and this danger is especially common when company or department leadership has a strong number background (e.g., engineers, accountants, project managers).

Optimizing tactics feels good, because you get feedback about your decisions. It’s addictive! And in marketing, much of what we do can be tough, inconvenient, or impossible to measure in the manner or timeframe that’s demanded.

Tactics are wonderfully distracting, but an over-emphasis on tactics subjects you to the tyranny of the now, at the cost of your future.

But an over-emphasis on tactics subjects you to the tyranny of the now, at the cost of your future.

You end up trapped in the short term, and only realize a long time later that the approach was doomed because you didn’t take care of the bigger, foundational (and more difficult) things first. For instance, you banged out a bunch of blog posts, but those posts didn’t actually achieve anything, because they were never really intended to do anything beyond hitting a monthly content target (usually not a meaningful goal). Or your videos generated views, but because they didn’t address buying barriers, they didn’t impact deal closure. Or you added new followers every day, but it didn’t matter at all.

You Got Stuck at a Local Maximum

When you start with a tactic, you’ll end up on any old random track, and who knows where it goes.

Maybe the worst thing about tactics is that their waste can be extremely sneaky: you have metrics that show you’re improving, so you must be on the right track, right?

But that’s only true if the track you’re on is the strategic one heading towards your destination objective.

When you start with a tactic, you’ll end up on any old random track, and who knows where it goes. In a likely scenario, you’ll end up at a local maximum, completely oblivious to the global maximum (or even other maxima) that could’ve been found with an objective-driven approach.

Are You Suffering from the Tyranny of Tactics?

Again, you only have a short window to figure stuff out, else your company is doomed.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine if you’re ruled by tactics:

Do you have frequent talks about marketing tools? Are you constantly adding new tools? Swapping out tools? Do you spend more than negligible time getting your tools to talk to each other?

Tools are a dangerous distraction if you don’t have sound messaging, and clear objectives, and purposeful strategies.

Tools are a means, not an end, and they distract from foundational marketing principles. For instance, all the digital promotion in the world will be wasted if your content is crap (and your content will be crap if it doesn’t have a higher strategic purpose).

I was at a marketing P2P recently where tools were a focal topic, and it really highlighted to me how dangerous this focus can be. People were rhyming-off their dozen favourite marketing tools (digital, automation, project management, etc.), and feverishly scrambling to write down new ones as they learned about them.

The tools had come to dominate.

Look, tools are useful: when I need to put a nail in a wall, I grab a hammer; when I need to keep track of some tasks, I use Trello.

But tools are a dangerous distraction if you don’t have sound messaging, and clear objectives, and purposeful strategies.

The tools are there to enable your activities, not consume your time. You can fool yourself into an illusion of productivity if you’re over-focused on them.

Of course, here’s the caveat: you need to be open to new tools, to trying new things…but don’t let them dominate!

Do you feel like you’ve been doing the same thing for years?

If you keep making tactical optimizations for years, and nothing meaningful is changing (so maybe you’re getting incremental improvements, but nothing extraordinary), then the problem is likely strategic, rather than tactical.

It’s time to step back and take a look at the forest.

Do you know why you’re doing a particular tactic?

And I mean really why.

Not “to get views” or some easily countable vanity metric. I mean which marketing strategy is supported by this tactic? Which objective is it driving? For instance, if you’re writing a blog post, then what is the tactical purpose? In support of what strategy? To drive what objective?

I’ve always loved this example, which I first encountered in Obliquity:

“An old story tells of a visitor who encounters three stonemasons working on a medieval cathedral, and asks each what he is doing. ‘I am cutting this stone to shape,’ says the first, describing his basic actions. ‘I am building a great cathedral,’ says the second, describing his intermediate goal. ‘And I am working for the glory of God,’ says the third, describing his high-level objective. The construction of architectural masterpieces required that high objectives be pursued through lesser, but nonetheless fulfilling, goals and actions.”

Here are some examples of the Objective→Strategy→Tactic approach:

• Drive Revenue→Increase Win Rate→Address Buying Barriers (e.g., in a blog post or video)
• Drive Revenue→Shorten Sales Cycle→Address Buying Barriers (a single tactic can support multiple strategies)
• Grow Demand→Highlight Solution Value→Tell Success Stories (e.g., in a blog post, in shareable PDF, in video testimonials, etc.)
• Increase Awareness→Educate→A non-promotional deep-dive report and/or webinar about a misunderstood industry topic

In practice, an individual strategy can support multiple objectives, and an individual tactic can support multiple strategies, leading to wonderful efficiency and effectiveness.

When was the last time you came up for air and talked about longer time horizons?

If your longer-term discussions come down to “do more tactics”, then you’re really missing the point.

Tactics suck you into the now, at the expense of your future. They can be insidious.

I had lunch the other day with a friend in marketing, and he lamented that he’s so busy with day-to-day things that he never gets to step back and look at the big picture. The now-now-now rush prevents organizations from working on the things that matter most.

In my previous role, I had the same problem. You really have to make the time, either individually or institutionally, for these discussions and this level of thinking. For me, I found that my business travel afforded me the opportunity, because it took me physically out of the day-to-day. The moment my car hit the 401 and headed towards Pearson, there was a complete change in my thoughts, away from the little stuff and towards the big things.

And if your longer-term discussions come down to “do more tactics”, then you’re really missing the point.

Do you put nearly as much resource investment into your overall objectives and strategies as you do into tactics?

Figure out how much time and money you spend on each – it’s a big warning sign if your time is disproportionately going to tactics.

Do metrics dominate? Do you only (or disproportionately) care about what can be measured, especially in the short term?

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – William Bruce Cameron (not Einstein)

Numbers take on this crazy power and influence, to the point that it’s easy to ignore everything else.

But it is unequivocally wrong to ignore everything else.

I was at a marketing P2P the other night and the speaker mentioned how a particular program had taken 8 months to really catch on, at which point it kind’ve took off. They only got to that point because they were committed to a strategy, and weren’t put off by a lack of short-term success.

Sometimes – maybe even frequently – you will need to be comfortable working without numbers. This comfort can be found more easily if you’ve taken the Objective→Strategy→Tactic approach (as in the P2P example), because you can trust that you’re working on the right things, for the right reasons.

I think it’s a complete cop-out, and incredibly dangerous, to only focus on things that can be measured, and things for which results are only clear in the short term. That’s an effective way to distract yourself now at the expense of your future, which is irresponsible and unprofessional.

Is your business enormously dependent upon a single tactic or a few tactics?

You definitely do not want to be at the mercy of a particular buying behavior, or channel, or search algorithm, or piece of legislation.

Diversifying your tactics, as a result of strategic and objective-oriented thinking, can make you much more resilient against the curveballs that will come your way.

Using Tactics Effectively

Tactics are important, obviously – they’re the part where stuff gets done – but they have to work for you, and not the other way around.

Here are some things you can do that will help you to use tactics responsibly:

• Focus on fundamentals first: work to become experts in your target markets (e.g., industries, pain points, real and perceived competitors, buyers, influencers, evaluators, champions’ needs, etc.); craft compelling messaging (don’t just shout about your product or technology, because no one wants to hear that)
• Get the order right: establish objectives, figure out strategies by which you can pursue the objectives, and only then think about tactics that can be employed
• Get comfortable working without numbers: some of the things you’re trying to achieve, especially at the objective- or strategic-level, will be very difficult to measure, especially in the short term; but you can still be confident you’re doing the right things if you’re following a top-down plan
• Carve out time: as a professional, you have to have the discipline to step out of the weeds and devote some real time to higher-level thinking
• Ask for help / don’t try to figure it all out on your own: especially in KW, we have this tendency to over-rely on our own ability to figure things out, and to underestimate the complexity of a problem until years later; talk to people who’ve done things before, because you just don’t have time to learn solely through your own experience

Whether you agree with this post or think I’m crazy, I’d love to hear your thoughts on marketing tactics and how they can be used effectively.

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Header/Featured photo credit: Marc A on Unsplash