Following Garrett Mattingly's narrative in his history titled simply The Armada, there is the suggestion there that the key might have been not to assemble the armada at all but instead to concentrate on the final conquest of the Netherlands; this would greatly strengthen Spain's position not only against England but France as well, as well as of course ending a drain on the treasury and replacing it with a source of taxes and other resources.
By the time of the Armada, Spain had been trying to crack the Dutch nut so long it had become conventional wisdom they could never prevail there without somehow slapping down the English. But Parma, who was the commander of the Lowlands expedition, believed that with the resources spent on the Armada invested instead in him, he could do it.
Restored Spanish control over all the Netherlands would still mean Parma's vastly superior army forces would somehow have to cross the Channel against English opposition, but sufficient naval force to escort the transports from harbors in the Lowlands, comprised in part or in whole of Dutch-designed and manned vessels evolved for Channel warfare, would be much easier to acquire in these circumstances, and once Parma's men were landed--well, this is where one should read Mattingly and then apply one's own sense of an alt-history army war between these crack troops and the sort of land forces Elizabeth would be likely to raise--bearing in mind the danger of a Catholic uprising was not negligible, especially given a strong Catholic force to rally to.
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I'm guessing this thread might be inspired by my response to another thread, so I won't elaborate on what I said there, which to be brief is to say the English had been concentrating on developing longer, more powerful, more accurate ranged naval cannon, a fact well known to the Spanish, and in the event the superior range of the English defense fleet's cannon did prove decisive despite some effective Spanish countermeasures.
The Armada suffered other liabilities--it was very far from the bases it had launched from, where its crews had been called to board long before the fleet set out, thus exposing them to shipboard diseases and malnutrition. (Also, an earlier expedition by Drake had among other things resulted in the destruction of stocks of seasoned wood for supply barrels; bad storage of food and water was a problem that plagued the Armada.) The English were of course near their bases and Elizabeth had defied the pleas and demands of her courtiers and largely dispersed the crews ashore for most of the waiting period--to save money, she said, but it also had the effect that the English crews were much fresher when they faced the Spanish.
So there are a lot of variables in there. One might skip the Armada completely and go with first crushing the Dutch. Or perhaps the Armada planners figuring out how to counter or match the superior English cannon.