Marketers’ creative tactics get all the spotlight: great pitches, big ideas and impressive creativity. All of that helps drive sales but only if it’s supporting a clear and effective strategy. Strategy is the necessary glue that binds all that brilliant creativity into a focused tool that delivers on specific business goals in any B2B marketing plan.
In the past two decades, marketing agencies have been relying on niche approaches where the likes of SEO experts, PR pros, branding or content experts and others each sell you on why their niche specialty is the one that will definitely drive sales. However, each of these siloed enterprises struggle to maintain relevance because they offer only a single tactic that isn’t aligned to a greater marketing strategy. Just imagine a warrior with a sword facing off against another warrior with a whole arsenal of weapons to choose from (including, perhaps, a machine gun). And for the business owner, juggling all these disparate tactical approaches becomes time consuming, confusing and frustrating.
Strategy clarifies goals. It unifies disparate teams and aligns everyone with a single marketing purpose. Strategy gives your tactical initiatives a focused purpose and helps you integrate tactics together to make all of them more effective. A solid strategy also measures results and is flexible enough to add or modify existing tactics to increase marketing effectiveness and help your business achieve its goals.