Mike McCready made a great comment on here the other day: 

I think one thing that would increase efficiency at my college is education. I know that sounds crazy. In many cases, those in marketing, senior leadership and other areas of campus were educated on development process, capabilities of technology, trends, and ways to improve marketing efforts (i.e. using analytics to track the success of offline and online campaigns). I see this education leading to increased efficiency.

I 100% agree with Mike that education is the silver bullet and, in that spirit, I’ve decided to revive the idea of my “back to basics” series, starting with the marketing framework I’ve created and refined over the past several months. 

 

Strategy versus Tactics

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

-Sun Tzu

I did my undergraduate coursework in public relations, and the very first thing they teach you in PR101 (and almost every subsequent class) is the difference between strategy and tactics.  There’s a good reason they teach it to you first - it’s a vital concept to understand and, unfortunately, one that very often isn’t. 

Here are some other ways you can thing about differentiating the two:

  • Tactics are the things you do to achieve a higher level strategy.  Strategy comes first, then tactics.
  • Strategy is usually long-term, whereas tactics are attempts to achieve short-term aims that contribute to the overall strategy.  Think of it as a battle (tactic) compared to the war (strategy).  This isn’t universally true - I can certainly think of instances where strategies would be shorter-term - but generally your eye should at least be on an annual timeframe for strategies. 
  • Tactics stand by themselves whereas strategies tend to be comprised of several tactics.  Example: An admissions email marketing strategy can have a goal of achieving 1,000 online applications, but that will probably take several tactical emails to achieve. 

 

My Marketing Framework

I designed my marketing framework to get the focus back on higher level strategy and goals first, and tactics second.  It’s meant to be a guide, to make sure you’re throughly thinking through all the components of your marketing program, and can justify what you choose to do later on down the line to senior administrators. 

Set Strategy: What are your higher level goals? What does success look like?  

Plan Tactics: What types of communications will we use to achieve our goals, and how will we measure results?

Execute Communications: Communicate with your audience using planned tactics.

Assess Results: Did we achieve our goals? What can we do better next time?

If you have a solid strategy, you don’t necessarily need to worry about executing every tactic perfectly since, in theory, you will be executing multiple tactics over the lifetime of your strategy.  In fact, you can recycle through steps 2-4 in the framework again and again, until you achieve the initial goals you set in the beginning, assessing your tactics as you go to identify how you can improve them.  Alternatively, if you don’t have an overarching strategy, you’re going to end up floundering since you’ll just be executing tactic after tactic after tactic, with no higher-level strategy to guide you.  

 

An Example

Say you work in an admissions office at a school who’s strategic plan calls for increased enrollment by 25% in the next five years. To do this, given your current yield, your admissions office needs to double the amount of print and online applications they are bringing in over the next three recruiting cycles.  As a component of this, you have been charged with doubling the amount of online applications you are bringing in during the upcoming recruiting year. 

Set Strategy: Double online applications in the 2009-2010 recruiting year.

Plan Tactics: Your tactics for this could be increased presence of the online application on your website, increased email marketing to your seniors with online application as the primary call to action, a blog by one of your admissions counselors about the application process (with prominent calls to apply), live chats with your counseling staff where prospects and their parents can ask questions, etc.  Part of this planning is measurement, so you’ll have to come up with quantifiable ways to assess whether or not these tactics are contributing to your overall goal.  For example, google analytics integrate with your email campaigns to see how many applications are submitted as a result or careful tracking of chat attendants in your database to see what percentage end up submitting applications.  You plan how you’re going to assess now to make it easy to assess later.

Execute Communications: Put your plan into action. This is the part you are going to spend the most time on - while planning can take a few months, executing all the different aspects of your plan in this case will probably take upwards of six to nine months simply because your strategy is one that lasts the entire recruiting year.

Assess Results: Assessment in this case really comes in two steps.  First, tactical assessment: How many applications did your emails bring in? Your blogs? Your chats? Secondly, and probably most importantly, strategic assessment - did you achieve your goal of doubling online applications in the recruitment year?  Tactical assessment can happen almost immediately and be on an ongoing basis throughout the recruiting year (recycling steps 2-4).  Look at your September application email to see if you can make your October application email better.  Alternatively, strategic assessment can’t really happen until the end of the recruiting year - Did I meet my application goal? Exceed it? You still always come back to that last question though - what can I do better next time? Based on a comprehensive evaluation, what can I do better next year to increase my application numbers even further? 

Since I had a clear strategy and goal at the beginning, it made it much easier to focus my tactics towards achieving it. Additionally, having a clear numerical goal made assessment easier - either I hit my number or I didn’t. It’s also important that the numbers actually came from somewhere - it wasn’t an arbitrary thing thrown out there with little thought for the sake of having a goal.  Finally, everything was tied into a larger institutional “business” goal, which is as it should be.

Thanks Mike, for inspiring this post.  Mike has been blogging like mad lately over on his site, and is producing a lot of great content.  If you haven’t already, check it out.

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