Not only does your marketing strategy influence our chances of success, but it also has an impact on your growth rate. If you think that your business is growing too slow, perhaps your marketing strategy isn’t going far enough to get you there…
Business seems to get tougher every year, but that’s something of a misnomer, not to mention an oversimplification. COVID craziness aside, if you’re feeling dissatisfied with the growth of your business, it might not be the market. Your marketing strategy plays a huge role in the success of any business.
Not only does your marketing strategy influence our chances of success, but it also has an impact on your growth rate. If you think that your business is growing too slow, perhaps your marketing strategy isn’t going far enough to get you there.
Here is a guide outlining the difference between short term versus long term marketing goals and how to leverage them both in your favor.
Short Term Marketing Goals, Immediate Gratification in Expected ROI
Short term marketing goals should be comprised of a range of purposes that you intend to complete from between the period of one quarter to 1-2 years. Individual businesses, like gaming studios and software companies, might have short term goals with a longer time frame in mind because it takes so much longer to bring their products to market.
When comparing short term and long term marketing goals, it’s important to note that there is a certain level of relativity to it.
The kernel of most short term marketing goals begins with raising interest. The initial effort to increase investment in a service, product, or brand is the point when your marketing goals are in their infancy.
It’s important to start raising interest sometime before your product is released. Some companies make the mistake of neglecting to market the product until it’s already been released, which in most cases, is a recipe for disaster. Even in today’s digitized world, it still takes time to get people talking.
An effective marketing strategy for selling a new product involves a well thought out preliminary campaign that begins before the product is released.
Keep in mind, however, that there is a sweet spot that you’ll need to find and stick to get the most value out of your marketing efforts. It would be best if you did not start talking about your new product too long before or after it is released, here’s why. If you begin pimping your product too long before it’s published, any interest that you managed to build up will dissipate and evaporate into thin air by the time it finally comes out. On the other hand, if you wait too long to start marketing the product, you’ll see underwhelming sales in the first quarter of its release.
This is why it’s so important to find and understand the sweet spot between these two points. That said, most companies, especially startups and small businesses, won’t have a deep understanding of that sweet spot. So how do you get around this problem? The savviest brands effectively circumvent this knowledge gap by partnering with an experienced and talented digital marketing agency to show them the way.
Long Term Marketing Goals Are Far More Favorable to SEO Results, Social Media Audience Development and Engagement, User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization to Perfect Your Online Sales Funnels for the Long Haul
Although they share some specific qualities and characteristics, most long term marketing goals will be distinct from short term marketing goals. Short term marketing goals primarily focus on the process of raising initial interest, bringing in your first customers, and getting them to talk about your business.
Long term marketing goals have a much broader and deeper scope. For one thing, long term marketing goals should include a strategy for hooking customers for life and building a long term customer base. The best and most brilliant long term marketing goals incorporate a strategy to encourage lifelong customers to pass their brand loyalty on to their children. One simple yet effective and readily understandable example of this kind of thinking can be found in the marketing strategy of McDonald’s.
The most central long term marketing concept to understand is that you don’t want one-time customers. What you should want are lifelong customers that unwittingly become brand ambassadors that bring in even more customers.
You should know that this does not mean that you should try to plan on selling each product for multiple generations without any variation. While this model works for some incredibly iconic products like Levi 501 jeans, it doesn’t work for others. Most products have life cycles of their own, and one of the keys to growing a business is to have a better understanding of those lifecycles than your customers so that you can effectively plan and think ahead of them.
An example of this would be releasing a fragrance with the understanding that you will market and push that product for the next 5-6 years. Once interest wanes and you pull the product, rather than scrapping it entirely, you put that product in your back pocket and re release it as a special edition 10-20 years afterward. Customers who loved the product in the past will be overwhelmed with excitement when they hear that it’s coming back on the market. Some of them will buy extra in fear that it could be pulled from the market again.
One thing that is especially important to remember is that your long term marketing goals should always be in alignment with your long term business goals. If, for example, your business goals entail becoming the number one supplier in your city within x amount of years while attaining x amount of revenue, you should align your long term marketing strategy with these goals.
How to Find the Right Mix of Short Term & Long Term Marketing Goals and KPIs?
When it comes to short term and long term marketing goals, you have to look at the big picture.
That means looking at where you want your company to be in the next two years, the next five years, the next ten years, 20 years, and so on.
Although planning for the long term is more complicated than short term planning, you must have a direction to follow because there are a variety of platforms out there who all vouch that they can increase your online exposure… Think we’re kidding, check out the image below which shows the ever saturated field of platforms vying for your company’s marketing dollars, no matter what the results may hold as many of these platforms are still in the early stages of proving their own products.
Without a direction, you will be left with only your short term goals, which, by definition, won’t get you very far. Neither your short term or long term marketing goals should be too vague or too rigid. If they are too vague, you still won’t have much of a direction to follow, and if they are too stiff, you won’t be able to handle challenges as well if you get thrown off course. Without direction, we are just sailors destined to the wind of the sails. (Sorry if that sounded like a corny dad joke or a drunk pirate’s joke, you got the picture.)
Different marketing goals are reached by using the right combination of different marketing tactics. You can see where short term and long term marketing goals differ by looking at the tactics that are used to reach them.
For example, short term marketing tactics involve search engine marketing, mainly focused on providing Google AdWords or Amazon PPC services — while long term marketing tactics involve search engine optimization, which makes things a step further.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an essential yet notoriously tricky science to master. Most businesses don’t have SEO experts sitting around in-house, which is why so many companies choose to partner with digital marketing agencies to walk them through it. Making a mistake with SEO can be expensive, especially when it comes to creating the content for an advertisement using Google AdWords.
A more distinct difference between short term and long term marketing tactics can be seen in the fact that short term marketing involves more advertising on social media. In contrast, long term marketing puts a greater focus on content creation. What does this difference mean? Placing ads on social media has always been a short term marketing tactic because, like other ads, most online advertisements only run for a limited amount of time and are used to generate interest. Content creation, on the other hand, is often used to sustain interest and is much more permanent.
Keep in mind; however, the line between short term and long term marketing tactics is often blurred, which is another reason why it’s advisable to work with a digital marketing agency to navigate these issues. Although many ads placed on social media only run for a certain amount of time, some of them feature content that is intended to serve a long term marketing goal, such as attracting repeat or lifelong customers.
So how do you find the balance and leverage your short term and long term marketing goals to drive the growth of your company and be successful? Most businesses will need the expertise of a boutique digital marketing agency to solve these problems and make the most out of what they have.
Get the Best of Both Marketing Worlds, with AlchemyLeads LLC
Still, stumped on how to grow your business by using the right mix of short term and long term marketing goals?
Try a free and customized consultation with AlchemyLeads, where you will find the best and brightest digital marketing sorcerers in the L.A. area and beyond. Feel free to contact us at the office line, +1-818-408-6550
As a white glove concierge service focused on quality of fulfillment and life time values of our clients — the actual number of clients that we take on is limited, because we’d rather be stretched thin doing the best fulfilment work with our happy paying clients who we’ve built years of trust and a family like bond. After all, that tends to happen when you make monumental improvements in a small business owners operation simply by identifying some areas of opportunities.
We believe in slow and organic growth. (Just like an SEO Would say, eh?) This means than rather than extend ourselves with more new accounts than we could possibly handle, we have a hard cap on how many clients we can have on our roster at any given time — which means that your company or firm will get the kind of white-glove, one-to-one attention that no other agency can offer.
We provide customized and nuanced solutions specific to each businesses circumstanced and our team of seven teammates provide unmatched dedication to every client that we serve.
Last fun fact of this post, we have not lost a single client on retainer since our inception in July of 2017. (Humble brag, but we had to do it!) Feel free to call our bluff by emailing us info@alchemyleads.com and we’ll show ya the hard evidence. 🙂
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