Internet Marketing: Strategies vs Tactics

February 20, 2007 | By Gobala Krishnan |

I was listening to Stephen Pierce speak on WinningYourNiche again, for the 7th time, and I still found something I didn’t quite grasp before.

It’s about Strategies vs Tactics. Do you understand the difference?

According to Stephen:

Strategies are like a road map for the marketing plan. Where as tactics are vehicles for the trip. Strategies are like doing the right things while tactics are doing things right.

Basically, in the call Patric Chan and Stephen Pierce talk about how most people would try to make money in a niche without a strategy.

They focus only on tactics, such as:

Blogging
PPC / AdWords
Email marketing
Forum posting
Writing and submitting articles

According to Stephen, all that does not matter if you don’t have an overriding strategy, such as:

How do I enter this market?
Who is the market leader, and how can I create something that complements him / her?
How can I get him / her to notice me, and probably do a JV in the future?
Where do the people in this market go to to get information - forums, a particular blog or blogs, newspapers, article sites?
How can I transition from serving the herd (giving the market what it wants) to leading the herd (creating demand in the market)?

I’ve read about making money in niche markets, and most of them have all to do with getting a bunch of keywords and deciding which is the most profitable (and easiest) to enter.

Stephen however has a different opinion and definition of niche marketing:

I consider a niche market for me, to be a market that is small enough for me to have a certain level of dominance, but yet big enough that it can be profitable from that dominance.

So for me if it’s a market, if it’s a segment of the market, or if it’s a fragment of the segment of the market; regardless of how you define it if its an area that I feel that as if I’m not able to win then for me I don’t consider it to be a niche. Because I only look at markets that as classified as niches if I’m able to get in there and have some kind of win.

[…]

I think for many people one of the mistakes they make is they go and try to create a knock off product. They feel as if they’ll be able to compete because they will make theirs bigger, better, stronger, what have you. And now they’re looking to compete on better sameness. And historically in business better sameness has never won the game.

Basically, if you have no strategy, then all the tactics you employ will not work, or will not get you a dominating position in that niche.

This is a great audio interview, from which I have learnt a lot of things. Some thing are common sense, but we tend to forget them after reading all those ebooks on tactics and forget to think about the strategy.

Get it at: www.WinningYourNiche.com