WARNING: Beware of Marketing Tactics. They Will Be Harmful to Your Growth

I have a riddle for you:

Q: What’s reactive and exciting at first but rarely yields positive outcomes?

A: Reactive marketing tactics 🥁

When I was an in-house head of marketing for several tech companies, my job included creating the growth marketing strategy for the upcoming year. This process required countless meetings, extensive data analysis, and collaboration with sales, customer success, product marketing, brand marketing, the executive team, data scientists—you get the point. A significant amount of time and effort goes into intelligently and intentionally planning for growth. So, why are we so quick to deviate from executing and optimizing it?

Here are some reasons why this might happen:

1. The data wasn’t good in the first place.

2. The goals have changed, so the company as a whole has to adjust.

3. Someone at the top has an anecdotal idea and persuades other leaders to pivot.

4. The growth team panics due to low performance or poor performance forecasts.

5. The product team releases something and feels strongly about its market importance.

To a certain extent, this is fine. 

Don't get me wrong—tactics are fine. Deciding to do a webinar at the end of the month is fine. Sending an extra newsletter or email to announce a new product feature is fine. Attending an event where many of your customers or prospects will be present is fine.

Where companies get into trouble is when reactive tactics are pushed so often that it creates a culture of reactiveness, causing strategy to fall by the wayside. I have personally witnessed this unconscious abandonment of strategy several times, even as recently as earlier this year.

They can come from the top

Orders for quickly executed tactics often trickle down from the top. The marketing team ends up spending so much time on these small tasks that they don’t have the time to effectively execute and optimize the big initiatives that drive meaningful growth. This sentiment about leadership's impact on growth marketing is also reflected in a previous blog: The Big Mistake B2B-Tech Leadership Can [and often do] Make.

Find your balance and keep growing

You can actually make everyone happy by finding a balance between reactive tactics and strategy. As a marketing leader, it's your job to maintain that balance, even if the conversations are tough. Here’s my advice:

Understand and explain the costs of launching the tactic: will it take your team away from doing something else of broader value? Will it use up email bandwidth for the week and inhibit others from being sent? Is there insufficient content to support the tactic, rendering it less valuable to the audience? If the pros out weight the cons, give it a shot. But remember the your original strategy is your north star 🌟

My final thought, which is based on executing a lot of reactive growth tactics (admittedly some of which were my idea): they don’t usually work and are often not worth the effort. They just make panicked people feel like they are addressing a problem. Stick to your strategy, give it more time, and trust the intelligence behind it.