Why a Long-Term Mindset is Crucial for Digital Marketing in 2020

With today's global uncertainty and the impending recession concerns, many businesses in nearly every industry will see budget cuts—especially in marketing. In an attempt to get the best possible results within little time, some business owners might also believe that their best option is to use their money on "quick wins" and short-term marketing campaigns while avoiding any long-term strategies, but this isn't the best course of action.

Instead of focusing on the short-term, try to build a strategy that balances both quick wins and long-term marketing strategies such as brand building. In fact, you'll do well to focus more on long-term tactics than you have in the past. We still have a majority of 2020 left, and long-term strategies planned throughout won't be any less important than they were last year.

How Is Long-Term Marketing Different from Short-Term Marketing?

A short-term marketing strategy is considerably more brief than long-term marketing strategies. A short-term strategy generally focuses on easier opportunities that take less time to yield ideal results, often for the next one to 12 months. On the other hand, long-term strategies are intended to last for as long as five to ten years and help companies dominate their competitors through a combination of SEO and brand-building efforts.

The main difference between the two apart from duration is that long-term tactics aim to build an emotional connection to the brand. Over time, as you develop brand loyalty and your customers trust your products or services, you'll see a reduction in customers' price sensitivity. Subsequently, you'll be able to charge more for the same product or service than lesser-known brands that have minimal loyalty. 

In a time of fear and uncertainty like today, it's more important than ever for businesses to build unwavering trust among their customer base. Utilizing a long-term marketing strategy will help you establish your brand as a trustworthy industry leader while your short-term strategies secure those smaller victories along the way.

How to Implement a Balanced Long-Term Approach to Marketing

When building a balanced marketing approach, you can still use short-term tactics like lead generation offers for smaller boosts, but don't expect huge payback for these efforts.

Tactics for the long term will help your audience connect with your brand over time through a combination of inbound and outbound efforts. Developing long-term SEO strategies, such as those that incorporate link building and guest posting strategies, will help you rank for more difficult terms that can take as long as years to appear for in top search engine results, while social media strategies can help you connect directly with your audience and further build upon SEO efforts. Long-term content marketing can help you regularly develop, publish, and curate content that yields great results for many years. Meanwhile, short-term strategies will help bring in more leads and win in other ways.

For example, a balanced approach might include a short-term marketing strategy that entails hosting a national or even global virtual event. This hosting opportunity could initiate some conversations with your company, and you can strengthen existing relationships in the process. Following this event, you can nurture these high-quality leads over time as part of your long-term strategy. You might encourage event attendees to subscribe to your newsletter to learn about future events or industry-specific topics of interest to them, or ask people to visit your website to learn more about the services or products you offer. These short-term lead-generation efforts may also be aligned with a long-term goal of achieving a record yearly sales number.

Other examples of short-term and long-term strategies could include:

• A short-term PPC campaign that boosts traffic to one or more pages for a brief period, attracting more high-quality leads
• Sales events or other types of events that are short-term but drive a lot of interest in your brand
• Long-term social media strategies that consist of developing a strong social media presence by sharing posts and interacting with users
• Long-term SEO that works to increase rankings for local or broad keywords in line with a content strategy, which can take months to rank well for
• Content marketing over months and years that could include building out industry and service pages, engaging in weekly or even daily blogging, or guest posting on other blogs, all of which can be invaluable in the long-term.

While the future is largely unclear as we face a recession and increased job losses, the future of marketing still looks bright as both short- and long-term efforts can help protect your business and make sure you stay afloat in the long run. 

By taking a balanced approach to marketing, you'll be able to make the most of your marketing budget and get the results you want. If you would like some help with developing a winning marketing campaign that can exceed your business goals in the short- and long-term, contact us today.