I am genuinely curious about this. If Linkedin Ad is tactic, what would be the corresponding strategy ? I am asking because currently, my B2B SAAS business is totally lost on digital Marketing and we are trying to figure out how to solve the problems.

I think it's important to realize that there isn't a 1:1 mapping of LinkedIn Ad <-> Strategy.

LinkedIn, to stay with the example, is going to give you a certain set of tools. How you use those tools is going to depend on your strategy. What that strategy is is going to depend on goals.

If you haven't or can't articulate your goals, you have to start there. Once you know what exactly it is you are trying to achieve, you can evaluate different strategies on how to achieve them (here it helps to also have a good idea of timelines or other constraints too).

So you have a goal (say, double engagement* with mid-career engineers in the next 12 mo), and a strategy (direct communication with targeted individuals, tailored by demographic), you can evaluate a tactic (post LinkedIn adds) and understand how it fits into your strategy based on the tools they give you.

* or some other metric, better if less handwavy

The corresponding strategy would be to have an overarching campaign narrative which was aimed at achieving a specific goal (registering interest, requesting a demo, signing up for a trial account, visiting a campaign page and going further down the funnel), or establishing a specific position for your brand in the market. This would be mapped to specific KPIs or metrics that you wanted to achieve.

A LinkedIn ad (or a Facebook ad, microsite, TikTok, Snapchat), targeted at a specific audience or audience subset, might be one tactic amongst many that you used to drive people toward achieving this goal. You would have different tactics for different parts of the funnel (i.e. an ebook for someone at the top, and a demo or webinar for someone at the bottom). You would then measure the success of these tactics to determine where to direct spend to achieve your goal.

Thanks. That clears it a bit more. Do you do consulting on the side ? Would love to talk more about this.

Not parent, but I could help you out. carl@ my username .com

Happy for you to email - email is in profile.

Define the goals of your strategy, map that out to KPI / Metrics.

Trying to get sign ups? Track landing page conversions, forms filled, optimise, rinse and repeat.

Ok, we've put tactics in the title.

Some of them are strategies, some are tactics. We had to come up with an umbrella term. :)

Most of them are tactics. Your "tomato/tomat-o" comment makes it seem like you actually don't care that much about the distinction or can't be bothered thinking it through. And that's a shame because this is a great list of tactics, but presenting them as strategies diminishes their credibility.

Can you elaborate? I agree there is no strategy here, just tactics but I am open to having my mind changed!

tomato / tomato-o

Noel: your cofounder has written an excellent roundup article on marketing tactics that has gotten good engagement with your target audience. Why demolish a substantial fraction of the goodwill you were accruing with a remark like this?

In point of fact tactics are more generally useful and can be employed in a number of different situations. They need to be in service of your objective and strategy but are where the rubber meets the road.

huh.

To me the distinction between strategy and tactic is exactly the opposite of a tomato/tomato-o distinction. They exist at different levels of abstraction.

On it's own, that's not important. What is important is that many companies, especially young ones, waste a bunch of time and/or do ineffective things precisely because they haven't made this distinction, and are thinking at the wrong level of abstraction for the problem they have (if they have even managed to frame it properly).

Um ok? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯