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“We need to post on LinkedIn.”
“We should probably run a webinar.”
“Can we get some paid ads behind this?”
“We need more content.”
These are all perfectly reasonable marketing ideas.
But they’re not strategies.
And yet, so often in B2B tech marketing, the conversation starts with “what should we do” rather than “what are we trying to achieve”.
That’s how you end up in the “Tactic Trap”.
Look, we get it. It’s so easy to launch straight into what channels are available. Or be led astray by a fun trend or new channel that’s taking off…
But this approach generally leads to lots of activity without much direction.
Suddenly you’re building five landing pages, scheduling social posts, and running a webinar series without any connection between any of it. And your budgets are getting stretched so thin simply because you’re trying to do it all.
It’s time to take a step back.
Get the basics right, the strategy tight, and the tactics will naturally fall into place.
So, how do you escape the tactic trap?
1. Stop asking “what should we do?”
This is probably the easiest way to spot the “Tactic Trap”.
If your campaign planning starts with a channel, format or piece of content, you’re already several steps too far down the road.
Try asking better questions first.
- “What’s changed?”
- “Who are we trying to influence?”
- “What problem are we trying to solve?”
- “What would success actually look like?”
Ultimately, you’re setting the direction and taking some of the guess work out of it.
2. Stop making assumptions
Which leads us on to another way businesses fall into the “Tactic Trap”. They think that it’s going to work without any proof to back it up.
Maybe a competitor is running ads on LinkedIn. Maybe a new social platform is trending. Maybe someone read an article saying webinars generate leads.
While sometimes these assumptions pay off, relying on guesswork is rarely a sustainable marketing approach. If you’re constantly taking shots in the dark, eventually you’ll miss more often than you hit.
This is where research comes in.
Look at your previous campaign performance. Talk to sales. Speak to customers. Review competitor activity. Look at market trends. Find out what your audience is actually saying, searching for, struggling with and responding to.
The aim isn’t to create a 47-slide research deck nobody reads.
It’s to build enough understanding to make informed decisions rather than expensive guesses.
Because if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you’re not really choosing tactics. You’re just picking things to do.
3. Give the campaign a job to do
Once you understand the context, give your campaign a clear job.
This sounds obvious, yet it’s also where things can get surprisingly woolly.
“Build awareness.”
“Drive engagement.”
“Generate leads.”
“Support the brand.”
These might be useful outcomes, but they’re not necessarily enough to guide your decisions.
A useful campaign strategy should make it clear:
- Who you’re trying to reach
- What you want them to think, feel or do
- Why they should care
- What you need them to do next
- How you’ll know whether it worked
- What resource you actually have available
- And, importantly, what you aren’t trying to do.
Because campaigns get into trouble when they try to do everything at once.
And most importantly, different objectives require a different marketing approach. For example:
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A campaign designed to change perceptions needs a different approach from one designed to generate immediate enquiries.
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A campaign aimed at existing customers needs a different approach from one targeting people who have never heard of you.
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And a campaign designed to create demand for a complex B2B tech solution… probably shouldn’t be judged by exactly the same criteria as a short-term lead generation push.
The objective should shape the activity. Not the other way around.
4. Make your tactics earn their place
Now we get to the fun bit.
You can finally talk about LinkedIn!
But instead of asking “Should we use LinkedIn?” ask “Why LinkedIn?”
And instead of “Should we run a webinar?” ask: “What job would the webinar do?”
“Can we create an ebook?” should be “Why is an ebook the right way to deliver this message to this audience?”
That small shift changes the conversation completely. Every tactic should have a reason for being there.
For example:
If the objective is demand generation, you might use thought leadership to create interest, paid media to reach a defined audience, and retargeting to keep your message in front of people who have shown intent.
If the objective is education, you might use expert content, video, webinars or customer stories to make a complicated proposition easier to understand.
If the objective is brand awareness, you might prioritise distinctive creative, high-reach channels, PR and thought leadership.
The point isn’t that one tactic is inherently better than another. It’s that the tactic should be the answer to the problem, not the starting point.
And if you can’t explain why a tactic is there, that’s probably a pretty good sign that it doesn’t need to be.
5. Beware of the “because we always do it” tactic
There’s another version of the “Tactic Trap” worth watching out for. The default tactic.
The thing you do because you’ve always done it. The channel that’s permanently in the media plan. The monthly content nobody can quite explain.
None of these things are automatically bad. But they shouldn’t get a free pass either.
Every campaign is an opportunity to ask: “Is this still the right thing to do?”
Because nothing stands still in business. What worked yesterday, might not work today.
Audiences change, markets change, even results change.
So your tactics should be allowed to change too.
6. The best tactic might be no tactic
This is perhaps the most important part of avoiding the “Tactic Trap”.
Sometimes the answer isn’t another campaign. It might be fixing the website. It might be sharpening the proposition. Maybe sales need better messaging or your customer onboarding needs looking at.
It might even be doing nothing until you know more.
Marketing activity isn’t automatically productive just because it’s activity.
In fact, one of the most useful questions you can ask before launching anything is:
What happens if we don’t do this?
If the answer is “not much”, you may have just found a tactic looking for a reason.
Strategy first. Tactics second.
The “Tactic Trap” isn’t about avoiding tactics. Of course not, you need tactics. All marketing needs tactics.
But the point is choosing the right ones, at the right time, for the right audience.
Start with the situation.
Understand the audience.
Define the problem.
Set the objective.
Work out what needs to change.
Then decide what you need to do about it.
Because the best marketing campaigns aren’t necessarily the ones with the most channels, the most content, or the biggest media budget.
They’re the ones where everything has a reason to be there.
And when every tactic has a purpose, your marketing stops looking like a list of things you’re doing and starts looking like a plan.
