How to Build the Foundation of Your Brand Storytelling Campaign: Strategy, Objectives and Tactics
When building your brand storytelling campaign, it’s critical to begin with a strong marketing foundation built on strategy, objectives and tactics. But what’s the difference among these marketing terms? This sounds like an easy question, but you’d be surprised how many marketers and agencies appear to confuse and conflate the terms. Each is critical to any marketing program or creative brief and you must create them to be easy to understand and follow before moving forward with your brand storytelling campaign.
Defining Strategy, Objectives & Tactics
Strategy is the overarching idea for your marketing to achieve. It should be at the core of what you want marketing to do for your organization. It’s the plan of action and often referred to as the go-to-market (GTM) strategy to drive that point.
Objectives are the mid-term measurable goals for your marketing activities. They outline what you want to achieve. Sometimes you have multiple objectives – and that’s great. Just be as specific as possible when stating your objectives. And try not to make an objective sound like an objection. Objectives should be positive “we will” statements, not negative “we will not” statements.
Tactics are the activities that you undertake to achieve your strategy and objectives. Again, be as specific as possible. This is where most people begin when it comes to a discussion about marketing. It’s the “fun” part. Launch events, parties, videos, tchotchkes, and all kinds of things appear in this list.
Using the 5Ws in Your Campaign
To help keep things clear, I often start with the 5Ws and split them up on a whiteboard:
If someone tries to jump to a who, where or when item, I quickly point out that they’ve moved to tactics and I gently nudge them back to the other side of the whiteboard until we are ready.
An Example Strategy Statement
Strategy: Strengthen and promote brand awareness for MSP Co., our managed services provider (MSP) company, among professional services firms with 10 to 50 partners and associates in the Greater New York-area to support sales growth of 20 percent in the current calendar year.
Note that in addition to a plan, I’ve added a prospective target client, location, size, and a sales goal, but I have not yet stated how the goal will be achieved. This should not be a “Social Media Strategy” or a “Public Relations Strategy” or a “LinkedIn Marketing Strategy.” Social Media, Public Relations and LinkedIn Marketing may become involved, but those are tactics. I am focusing on the marketing strategy. Too many discussions begin with, “I just want to focus on strategy” and quickly turn to, “Now how can we use Instagram?”
An Example Objectives Statement
Objectives: Promote MSP Co. thought leadership on the technology challenges facing mid-size professional services firms and our expertise in providing managed technology solutions that reduce costs and increase operational efficiency.
Again, we have not dived directly into tactics, but now we are outlining a little more around MSP Co.’s message that they can understand and deliver measurable success in providing a solution to their target prospect’s pain around technology usage.
Tactics, the Fun Stuff
The tactics are in support of the strategy and objectives. It is often the default shortcut that marketers take when speaking about a campaign. Different tactics will be employed, perhaps the development of a blog or podcast on technology challenges and an eBook or webinar introducing solutions. These may be tied to lead generation or trade show follow up campaigns.
Don’t take the shortcut! Building tactics before developing your strategy and objectives is backward – you’re just making random picks among marketing activities. Like I said, tactics are the fun part, but they are meaningless without the foundation of a strong and directed strategy and measurable objectives to back them up.
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