Thirty years in marketing operations, and a team built to deliver it.

Who built this practice

Phil Easley-Bosley is a thirty-year expert marketing consultant and the founder of Tactical Marketing Automation, LLC (operating as Tactical Marketing), which he established in 2017. The path that brought him here is not a straight line.

In his early twenties, Phil established himself in sales and marketing through an innovative approach to partnerships. In San Diego, he became the preferred vendor for ASID leadership at JW Floor Covering, building the kind of institutional relationships that compound over time. He went on to lead marketing and public relations for multiple publicly traded companies, and served as head of sales and marketing at Cal.net, where he tripled the lead sales volume. Before any of that, he served as a Fire Support Specialist in the military. The instinct to operate under ambiguous conditions with incomplete information and real consequences did not come from a consulting engagement. It came from before there was a practice to run.

When marketing automation was new and most marketers had not heard of it, Phil got excited about what it could do. He joined Act-On Software intentionally: in his own words, to become the marketing automation expert. He became Lead Marketing Automation Strategist and CS Enablement Manager, partnering with innovative leaders and working with thousands of clients to listen to how they defined their needs, help develop their programs, and deliver results. He authored the Marketing Automation Strategy Guide during that tenure, which became the standard reference for Act-On's customer base.

The combination that resulted from that path is not something a linear career produces: every digital tool available, a deep understanding of the marketing landscape, thousands of client consulting engagements, and a consistent priority on training and team building. That vantage point gave him the insight that led to founding Tactical: to do the work in a more durable form than arm's-length advisory work allows, as an embedded operating partner rather than an outside consultant.

The team Phil leads

Phil personally oversees the work at Tactical Marketing and has trained the entire team to his methodologies, so the standards on every engagement reflect how he would run it himself. He works closely with clients as a consulting partner: present in the strategy, the architectural calls, and the judgment moments. What he is most proud of is the diverse team of experts he leads.

The client-facing front line is led by two senior operators. Scarlett Miller, Senior Marketing Operations and Campaign Manager, runs the day-to-day client work and brings an unusual combination of artistic sensibility and operational precision to campaign builds, automation QA, and process documentation. Guadalupe Magana, Marketing Operations Specialist, owns the analytics, segmentation, and platform configuration work across engagements, with a data analyst's discipline shaped by her ongoing M.S. in Business Analytics.

Behind them is a broader group of senior specialists Phil has assembled over decades, brought in by discipline as the work calls for them: deliverability, integrations, custom development, paid media, design, creative. The firm has the depth to deliver across the full Define / Develop / Deliver scope without farming work out to unknown vendors. Tactical Marketing is not a one-person shop, and the operational continuity reflects that.

Meet the team.

tacticalma.com is now tacticalmarketing.com

In 2026, as part of the company's growth, we migrated the firm's web presence from its original domain at tacticalma.com to its full name at tacticalmarketing.com. The legal entity is the same: Tactical Marketing Automation, LLC, founded in 2017. The team, the engagements, the methodology, and the contractual relationships all carried over unchanged. If you find tacticalma.com referenced in older case studies, partner directories, vendor records, or third-party reviews, that is the same firm. The original domain still resolves to us; the full name simply matches how clients have referred to the practice for years.

What the work actually is

Most marketing programs have a layer of work that doesn't fit cleanly into anyone's job description. The platform configuration. The data plumbing. The campaign-level governance. The integrations between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. That's the layer Tactical Marketing operates in. We attach to your team as the people who keep it coherent, and we cover both the architectural calls and the day-to-day execution under the same retainer. Not a creative agency. Not a platform vendor. Not a CRM shop. The role doesn't have a clean industry name; the work itself is what defines it.

When the system is working, nobody thinks about it. When it isn't, the campaign fails and the cause is hard to diagnose. Most of what we do happens in that second condition before it becomes the first.

The shape of the work

Define. Strategy, architecture, scoping, and the call about what "good" actually means for your program. Consulting, solution engineering, prompt engineering - the judgment work that determines whether everything downstream has a foundation worth running on.

Develop. The systems your campaigns depend on, and the campaigns those systems run. Marketing automation, CRM, integrations, custom apps, and the website on the build side. Paid media, SEO, email, content, and creative on the execution side. Both delivered by the same operators, so what your buyers see is consistent with how the underlying stack was meant to behave.

Deliver. Tracking infrastructure, reporting, attribution, and the analysis that connects what we shipped to what your business actually saw in return. Reports are only useful if the data feeding them is honest. Most of the work at this layer is making sure it is - before anything gets graphed.

The full inventory of what sits inside Define, Develop, and Deliver lives in the Operations Hub, organized by discipline. The cornerstone definition of the practice is at What is tactical marketing?.

Where AI fits

AI runs through all three layers of the work. In Define, it accelerates research, synthesis, and the prompt engineering that makes downstream AI use reliable. In Develop, it compresses the time between brief and first-draft execution on automation logic, copy, and segmentation design. In Deliver, it flags anomalies in data pipelines faster than a manual review would catch them. The work that used to take a day often takes two hours. That speed compounds across a retainer.

What makes it work without turning into noise is the governance layer around it. We call it the harness: the structured set of decisions about what AI is allowed to touch, on what data, under what review conditions, and with what record of what happened. Every AI-assisted output runs through the same judgment-and-review process the rest of the work does. The time to first draft is shorter. The standard for what ships is not.

The accountability side of that is not optional. When something AI-generated breaks in a live operation, there is no escalation path to the model. The accountability lives with whoever reviewed and shipped it. That is either one of our operators, or the client's team. We build that into how we use it.

The discipline side of that argument, including the post that explains the harness concept in detail, is in the AI & Discipline series and in What is an AI harness?.

How the work is delivered

Inside engagements, the work runs against a documented methodology. Personas come out of buyer psychology, not seat titles. Copywriting is keyed to where the buyer is in the journey, not where the campaign is in the calendar. Automation responds to behavior. The operating method gets refined every cycle, not built once and inherited. The full version is at /docs/methodology.

Who this is for

Companies whose marketing ambition is bigger than their marketing headcount. Usually that's a B2B operation with a small in-house team - two, three, sometimes five people - running a program whose scale and complexity would normally require twice that. The team gets the architectural depth and platform execution they can't justify staffing internally. We get a standing engagement and a long-running relationship with the system.

Why retainers, not projects

The retainer model works because the relationship runs on judgment, not on tickets. We don't renegotiate every shift in priority, every cross-functional handoff, every change in scope. That doesn't come from a process trick. It comes from the calls inside the engagement consistently turning out to have been the right ones. The long-running retainer is the form; the latitude to make those calls without re-litigating them is the substance.

When an engagement runs the way it should, the operational judgment the firm brings becomes deeply embedded in how the client's program is run. That depth of involvement is what the retainer model is built to sustain, and what distinguishes it from project work.

For the cornerstone definition of the discipline, read What is tactical marketing?, or browse the full Operations Hub for the operational services laid out by discipline.