Tactical marketing is about what you can do today

Tactical marketing is about making sure that you are doing all of the small or easy things that make a difference to your bottom line. In many cases you will have a marketing plan and be delivering to it. But sometimes the plan can blind us to the short term, agile activities that can make a real difference. Tactical marketing is practical marketing. It is about quickly identifying those things that can be done cheaply and quickly that will deliver support to your existing marketing activities as well as supporting any short term objectives.

Just doing it – barriers to overcome

There is a philosophy to tactical marketing as well. It is about recognising the right time to act and the right way to act. It is also about having the right business attitude to allow rapid, and potentially risky activities to take place. It may be seasonal promotional campaigns to fill a summer holiday lull. You need to make sure that you are making

Making sure tactical marketing is done properly – your activity checklist

Tactical marketing by its nature is a short term piece of activity and is based on simply doing. However here are a few things that you’ll should think through before doing anything rash!

1. What do you want to achieve? (overcome short term sales blip, work on specific segment). Have a clear idea of the outcome you are looking for from your tactical activities. This will help you focus your attention where it is needed
2. Carry out an activity audit – This can be provided by a simple checklist and will reassure you as to what is already being done
3. Carry out a conflict assessment – make sure that whatever you want to do does not clash with your current marketing programme in terms of your brand/image, pricing and product strategy and existing activities. Once you have your audit and you and clear there are not conflicts then put your ideas into action. Focus on making it happen over perfection. BUT … be prepared to deal with the results. Ensure you have the people and systems in place to deal with enquiries, fulfilment and any non-standard requests
4. Establish an idea process – many tactical ideas come from those closest to your customers. Ensure that you have process in place for capturing, implementing and rewarding staff for ideas. Where possible rewards people on results but also on the simple process of idea generation