Investing in your marketing for the long term
When you’re first starting out in business, it can be easy to dream of being an overnight success with sales flooding in the door on day one! But the reality is often a whole lot different…
In this competitive market it takes much more than a few Instagram ads and some influencer marketing to drive success for the long term. So why should you be thinking about your long term marketing goals, and what part do they play in your overall marketing strategy?
The customer journey
The customer journey in 2022 is complex! It’s omni-channel and non-linear - you need to be where your customers are, with the right message, at the right time. More than ever, customers will see or interact with your business through a variety of channels and touchpoints before ever buying from you.
That’s where consistency comes in. On average, it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember your brand (Pam Moore). You need to have a consistent brand and messaging across all your channels, to help build trust with your customer and take them on the journey to buy. While it might feel meaningless to start with - no one’s engaging with your posts, or you’ve only got a handful of email sign ups - good things take time. In fact, over 70% of brand managers consider building an audience more important than converting sales (Bynder). By spending the time investing in your brand, creating content and building your audience, you’ll be in good stead to create a highly engaged group of potential customers, who know you and understand your business.
An example of a customer journey
Long term vs. short term marketing strategies
When it comes to creating a marketing strategy, you’ll want to have a good mix of both long term and short term activities. Short term strategies will allow you to influence the current state of the business with some levers you can pull quickly, while long term strategies are those bigger picture items that might not seem urgent or useful right now, but will pay off in the long run. So what could some of those strategies be?
Some of your short term strategies could include…
A flash sale, a limited time offer, or a free discovery call to drive urgency
Running remarketing ads or sending emails to users who abandoned their cart, to capture a hot audience who are ready to buy
Engaging an influencer on a one off basis, to drive sales of product or service
Some of your long term strategies could include…
Producing monthly blog content, to build a wealth of knowledge that’s invaluable to your customers and improves your SEO and Google rankings over time
Ongoing brand ads, to keep your brand top of mind for your audience - even when you’re not promoting a specific product, service or offering
Producing customer case studies and testimonial videos, that help enhance your offering and build trust with your customers
Here’s what we achieved for one of our clients!
We’ve been practising what we preach with many of our clients, and have seen some incredible results over the years. Here’s what one of our e-commerce brands has achieved, two years into our engagement with them.
Grew purchases from zero, to more than $250,000 a year
Grew an email database from zero, to more than 7,000 subscribers
Grew a highly engaged social following from 2,000 people, to more than 5,000
Sent weekly emails (every week for two years!) that continue to see open rates of more than 30%, click through rates of 2%, and sales attributed from every email sent
Implemented paid advertising strategies that see on average a 5x return on ad spend, that’s consistent across all campaigns
Not sure where to get started when it comes to creating your long term marketing strategy? We’d be happy to help - book a call with Tina here.