It is important to know the difference between strategy and tactics.
The thing is
– Strategy focuses on the why.
– Tactics focuses on the how.
A strategy is made up of multiple tactics.
Patrick Willoughby
The strategy is the planning … and the tactics are the concrete actions you take to carry out the strategy.
Claudia Miller
Tactics bring traffic to your website but a strategy brings targeted traffic to your website. You cannot have tactics without a strategy, tactic is born out of strategy.
Strategy Comes Before & After Tactics
When you will realize that tactics often require strategies of their own, then things will get a bit muddled for you.
For example,
When you start a new company, you will realize that, SEO, Social media, usability, and digital marketing tactics. All these tactics need their own strategies for them to be successful. Having tactics without any strategies is like shooting without a target, you need to have to strategy for your every business tactic, then only you will get the targeted results that you want.
As you see Digital marketing is a single big tactic for your business growth, but SEO is different, SEO is like a new tactic for your growth. So it requires a whole new strategy.
Optimizing title tags, navigation optimization, and schema implementation are all solid SEO tactics, but they might not work without a strategy.
Strategy – Tactics – Strategy
You should know that your goals give strategy, which gives tactics, which gives strategy, which gives more tactics, and so on this cycle goes on.
For example, if a website’s goal is to improve sales by 10% over the next 12 months, then the first thing you will have to do is come up with a strategy. That might include these tactics
– Organic optimization.
– Paid advertising.
– Social media marketing
– Site UX optimization.
But this isn’t the complete strategy, you have to look at each tactic and ask yourself a question that how will you achieve your goal.
For example, the organic optimization tactic requires its own strategy, that is
– Site architecture improvements.
– On-page optimization.
– Local optimization.
– Link building.
Now from here, we have to look at the strategy for all these tactics.
For Example, on-page optimization requires these tactics
– Titles.
– Descriptions.
– URLs.
– Breadcumbs.
– Content.
And yet again some of these tactics require a strategy.
– Format for your title and descriptions
– How to integrate a call to action.
– Will there be structured URLs and Breadcrumbs.
It is important to create a strategy for each tactic then only you will achieve the goal you have in your mind.
Without a strategy, you don’t have anything to compare your success. You got the traffic, But is it the right traffic? And was it profitable?
Anyone can implement SEO tactics. But without a strategy, they are aiming at nothing.
Strategy Always Comes First
If you ask me I think strategy always comes first, and strategy should drive the tactics.
So, the difference between strategy and tactics is that a strategy is a way to evolve tactics and use them to achieve the goal you have in your mind.
You can try to implement tactics without setting up a strategy, but you’ll never get the results that you want.
