Your marketing strategy is your promotional message. It consists of selecting target markets and determining what to say and how to communicate your message to your audience. Your strategy includes your headlines, sub-headlines, illustrations and photos, the body of your message, and your offer. For more on strategy, visit the strategy section of this website.

Your marketing tactics, on the other hand, include the type of promotion you plan to create, your frequency of messaging, and the means by which you communicate your messages (your media mix). Your tactics include websites, social media, email, online yellow pages, YouTube, Internet advertising, print media, radio and television commercials, direct mail, webinars, teleconferences, expos, faxes, and billboards. Tactics also include your business development approach and the generation of marketing tools, such as videos, landing pages, CDs, and white papers. Your tactical plan includes three components— an Action Plan, Media Plan, and Marketing Analysis.

Tactical marketing also includes determining target markets, conducting primary and secondary marketing research, establishing and monitoring marketing budgets, initiating and managing referral programs, client or patient satisfaction surveys, follow-up plans, and creating joint marketing ventures and strategic partnerships. All these factors should be considered when preparing your tactical plan. Of course, it is unlikely your plan will encompass all of these, as many plans include less than half. We developed a checklist that we use when we conduct planning with our clients to ensure nothing is overlooked, and to guard against emphasizing the wrong priorities.

Your Action Plan

Your Action Plan is the portion of your tactical plan that includes every activity you chose to implement with timelines and assignments of responsibility for completing each task. We call these specific actions targets.

Your plan should address the need to conduct marketing research, the development of promotion (online, print, and/or traditional media), and a list of actions broken down by target market and type of activity directed toward each. For example, a podiatry group's target markets could include referring physicians, insurance providers, independent practice associations (IPAs), senior citizens, school athletic programs, community athletic programs, and local employers.

For the above example, let us take one of their target markets— senior citizens. For this target market, actions could include developing a newsletter, purchasing a local mailing list of people 60 and over, setting up talks and screenings at the local senior center and retirement homes, advertising in a local senior online publication, creating social media pages especially for seniors, and developing a section of the practice website for seniors. You would then list every specific action that needs to be accomplished for the senior market along with the name of who is responsible to complete each target with a deadline for completion.

MediaPlan

We set up a client's Media Plan as a table that includes the name of each medium, type, and size of the ad being run, the frequency the ad will run, the cost, start date, and end or renewal date. You also want to track calls, appointments and new clients attained from each medium.

Ideally, your media plan can be set up at the beginning of each fiscal year and run for 12 months. However, our clients usually prefer a six-month plan.

Marketing Analysis

You need to be keeping monthly statistics on all your promotional actions. We suggest you review the sample Action Plan, which you are welcome to download, to give you an idea of what statistics we recommend you keep.

Periodically (usually quarterly), we analyze and then review the statistics with our client to determine what actions need to be taken to improve marketing results. This involves analyzing statistics, understanding how to interpret trends, and knowing when and what type of changes should be implemented, if any. There is an entire science dedicated to how to perform this step.

Your Action Plan Is

a Dynamic Document

Situations change, including the economy and competition, as well as your internal environment. As a result, most Action Plans require periodic revisions.

Value of Strategy versus Tactics

Most professional service businesses place the majority of their attention on tactics, although strategy is usually senior in importance The reason why businesses spend less time on strategy is they have little understanding of how to create content that will allow them to increase marketshare. Since this is rarely taught in universities, most marketing graduates lack the know-how. Yet because messaging is at least as important as tactics and is sorely neglected, it is essential for professional service providers to concentrate much of their effort on developing a powerful marketing strategy.