There’s quite a bit of confusion in business when it comes to strategies and tactics. Even seasoned professionals sometimes confuse the two. So let’s spend some time here and explain our take on how these two important planning elements differ from each other, where they come in, and why they are so critical to your business.

Introducing the Strategic Pyramid

First, there’s your vision, which describes where you want your business to be in 3-5 years. From that springs your mission, which articulates why your business exists to begin with. It reflects the very purpose of your purpose of existence in context of your vision. Then, there are your goals, which articulate what you want to achieve. (Some break these up into strategic and SMART objectives, but let’s keep things simple for now.) After those come your strategies, which describe how you will achieve your goals. And finally, you design your tactics, which are a set of pragmatic activities you will execute to achieve your goals. And these five elements combined form what is called the strategic pyramid.

Theory to Practice …

Let’s put this all into a practical context; let’s say we (Pinnacle) strive to be a leading business and marketing advisory firm in Jordan, and we want to accomplish this in three years. This would be our vision. In context of that, our mission is to provide clients with effective and practical consultancy services that tangibly and positively impact their business’ performance.

Our goal is to generate adequate revenues to sustain and grow our business, and to produce reasonable returns for our shareholders. Hence, one of our strategies could be to position the firm as a figure of authority in its fields of expertise, so it becomes the de facto go-to firm for people who face business and marketing challenges they need help with.

The tactics we’d deploy to that end could include writing periodic post articles (such as this one), promote them via relevant social media channels (such a LinkedIn), invest some money in Google Ads to generate traffic to our blog and website, and grow a mailing list to which we send our latest news and announcements, but with content tailored to each recipient’s particular areas of interest.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Especially if all of this is built on sound research and analysis. After all, wherever you want to go (your vision), and whatever reason your business exists for (your mission), has to be built on what the market needs and wants (research), and capitalize on your business’ particular strengths and opportunities (analysis), right?

We hope you enjoyed this article. For more, follow our blog or join our mailing list via our website. And if there’s a particular topic you’d like us to write about, just drop us a comment below.

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