5. Brand positioning
How will you differentiate your products and services in a competitive market? Where does your brand rank in the collective consciousness of consumers? This is where your brand positioning strategy plays its part, helping people quickly recognize, favor, and connect with your business.
Within the strategic planning playbook, brand positioning is a statement that includes a description of your target audience and how you’d prefer the brand to be perceived by customers.
A brand positioning strategy starts with research, not tactics. Research who your customers are, get an in-depth understanding of their needs and take the time to research how your competitors are positioning and differentiating their own brands from yours.
Strategic planning of your brand story is crucial. It’s through the brand story that customers will know what you believe in as a company and what pain points your product or service resolves. This strategy comes across in the tone of voice and messaging used for print, web, social, and more.
What are tactics?
Okay, so what are tactics? Tactics are the specific activities or actions taken by an organization to fulfill its strategic aims. These actions can be taken as one or a series of tasks. When you compare strategy vs. tactics, you’ll find that tactics are more grounded than strategies with best practices and specific plans.
Tactics should be
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Clearly tied to your strategy
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Short-term tasks, activities, or projects
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Actionable and time-bound
Some organizations may refer to their tactics as strategic initiatives. Driven by purpose, a tactic is completed within a finite timeline and involves activities to finish and impacts to measure. These short-term actions can help a business achieve its larger, strategic goals.
Example of strategy vs. tactics
To better understand the difference between strategy and tactics, let's look at some examples.
Team: Product
Strategy: Improve product performance metrics by 15%, including reliability and scalability.
Tactics:
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Perform user research to better understand pain points.
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Conduct user surveys and collect reviews.
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Adopt a CRM system to manage customer interactions more efficiently.
Team: Marketing
Strategy: Increase email marketing open rates by 5%.
Tactics:
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A/B test different subject lines.
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Implement an email automation system.
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Experiment with email send frequency.
Team: Project Management
Strategy: Improve efficiency in Q4.
Tactics:
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Assess project management software.
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Monitor team hours to ensure proper task distribution.
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Develop backup plans for higher-risk scenarios.
By monitoring and measuring the success of each tactic, you can adjust them as needed to drive your team toward strategic goals.
How to use tactics to carry out your strategy
Tactics are the action items we take in order to successfully implement our strategy. Without tactics, our strategy becomes a far-off idea with no clear path forward. Here are four steps to using tactics to execute your strategy.
- Clearly define your strategy: Brainstorm your strategy with stakeholders to get everyone on the same page.
- Create an action plan: Break down your tactics into smaller, tangible tasks needed to implement your strategy.
- Create OKRs: Assign OKRs to each task and track progress. This makes everything more clear and attainable.
- Implement and test: Implement your plan and create benchmarks to assess how the project is going. Adjust as needed.
How to measure strategy vs. tactics
On their own, the measurements of tactics are not a clear indication of the success (or failure) of an organization’s strategy. It’s the strategy itself and its objectives that inform a company’s KPIs or key performance indicators. Measuring KPIs can help you determine the success of your strategies.
Tactics can be measured in terms of their cost, timeliness, or how well they align with the strategies they were meant to fulfill. When evaluating strategy vs. tactics, always remember they work together as a means for an organization to realize its goals as efficiently as possible.
