Tactics come last
Most marketing starts here: a new channel, a new tool, another campaign. Tactics without strategy are noise, to buyers and to AI. On the Strategy Staircase they are the bottom step, and every step above has to be settled first.
Strategy is the recipe. Tactics are the ingredients.
Think about chocolate chip cookies. Flour, butter, eggs, vanilla and chocolate are the tactics. Dump them all in a bowl at random and you don’t get cookies. You get mush. The recipe tells you which ingredients go in, which stay out, in what order and in what proportion. That’s strategy.
Digital marketing has more ingredients than any kitchen: search, social, email, websites, video, display, influencers, referral programs, and now AI answers. The ingredients are easy to buy. The recipe is the hard part, which is why tactics are the last of the nine decisions in PB²-GOST³, not the first.
Most of the work happens here, which is why it comes last
Ninety-something percent of a marketing team’s time, money and effort lands in tactics. That’s exactly why they have to come last. If you haven’t decided who you’re talking to, why they should choose you, how much you can spend, and the goal and objective the work serves, every tactic is a guess.
Ask “should we spend on TikTok or LinkedIn?” and the honest answer is: which one better serves your strategy and your objective? Without those, there’s no way to choose.
There’s strategy inside tactics, too
Strategy works like a set of nesting dolls. There’s a social media strategy. Inside it, a strategy for one platform. Inside that, a strategy for one format, like carousels, and inside that, the play itself: “comment and we’ll send you the guide.” Each level is real. The mistake is starting at the smallest doll and never connecting it back to the business.
Two kinds of plays: build demand or harvest it
Every tactic serves one of the two strategies from the strategy step. Brand building reaches the many people who will buy someday, so you’re the one they remember. Sales activation harvests the few who are ready to buy now. Different tactics do each job well.
Common ways to harvest demand:
- Search, everywhere people search. Someone types “foundation repair Plano” into Google, YouTube, TikTok or ChatGPT. Showing up there, with an answer that matches what they need, is the most basic way to catch demand that already exists.
- Referral systems. Turning happy customers into a sales channel, like the fitness app that offers you credit for every friend who signs up.
- Education systems. Teaching people how to solve their problem, often with a free guide, so the solution leads back to you.
Brand-building plays are about consistency and memory: the same distinctive message, seen often enough and in enough places that it sticks. The Brand page explains why that matters even when nobody is buying yet.
Paid, owned, earned
Media just means the middle, whatever sits between the brand and the customer. Paid media is where the brand pays: ads, sponsorships. Owned media is what the brand controls: the website, email, its own content. Earned media is what customers and others control: reviews, press, word of mouth.
Campaigns that combine all three under one brand strategy perform better than ones that don’t, and earned media adds the most. The goal is to make an impression, not just buy one.
Owned media is the foundation
Owned media is everything you control: your website, your email list, your content and your data. It’s the one part of the mix you don’t rent from a platform, so it’s where to build first. A good website is more than looks: the user interface, the user experience and the overall customer experience all decide whether a visitor takes the next step.
Data deserves its own line. It runs digital marketing the way oil runs the economy. Every visit, open and click tells you what’s working, so owning your data is owning your ability to improve.
Digital marketing is more than ads
Digital advertising is one part of digital marketing. Your website, search presence, email, social, reviews and content all carry the plan, and most of them aren’t ads at all.
Reach, depth, relationship
Every campaign moves people through three stages. Reach: they’ve never heard of you, and now they have. Depth: they want more, so they visit your site, follow you and investigate. Relationship: they’ve bought, and now you want them back, buying more often or leaving a good review.
With a limited budget, the job is to decide which channels to turn on at each stage, not to be everywhere at once.
That’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel. Multichannel means you’re present in many places, often saying different things. Omnichannel means every channel sounds like the same brand, so each impression builds on the last. A brand works as a bridge between them, which is how separate pieces add up to one memory.
Find your O-ring
The Challenger shuttle failed because of one small rubber seal. A complex system is only as strong as its weakest part, and a marketing system is a complex system.
Picture the path from a social post to a sale: people see the post, some search for your name, some click, some call, some book, some buy. Each step multiplies the one before it. If any step is zero, the whole result is zero. And if a weak step goes from 1% to 2%, everything after it doubles. Most of digital marketing happens after launch: you watch the numbers, find the weakest step, fix it, then find the next one. That’s the tracking step.
The same tactic won’t work for every company
Two pool companies can run the same kind of campaign and get opposite results, because one sells to multimillionaires and the other to families stretching to afford a pool. Most of the difference comes down to who your audience is and which problem you solve for them. Copying a competitor’s tactics copies their decisions, not yours.
Treat tactics like investing, not day trading. Expect the first version not to work, test, and keep what earns its place.
Measurement is getting harder
It used to be easy to follow a customer’s trail from ad to click to sale. Privacy rules and AI are changing that. More buyers now get their answer without clicking anything, which is called zero-click marketing. That makes it more important to decide up front what you’ll measure and how you’ll know a tactic is working.
To see how your current mix reads to AI, start with the free AI Brand Scan.