- Pricing
- Contact us
- Book a Demo
- Platform
Determining whether to focus on short-term or long-term marketing (also known as transactional vs. relationship marketing) can be tough. However, when you’re building your marketing plan, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of both. Commonly, marketers are drawn to short-term marketing tactics. This is because they produce results quickly, justify spend immediately, and potentially lead to a salary bonus for the marketing department. However, without investment in long-term marketing, the company may struggle. Often, the business may win the battle, but lose the war.
Short-term marketing is the process of using marketing tactics that produce revenue-centric outcomes. The results are nearly immediate. Examples of these outcomes are leads or purchases. These tactics will follow your purchasing cycle. Generally, short-term marketing is a higher cost, has a more guaranteed return, but generally has a lower return on investment, or ROI. This is commonly referred to as transactional marketing as it usually leads to a sale in the short term. With short-term marketing, there is a clearer path to ROI.
There are a ton of short-term marketing tactics that your business can look into. Search engine marketing (SEO) is one of the most popular forms. This includes advertisements on Google or other search engines. The next example is lead form ads on LinkedIn or Facebook. Lead forms are ads that ask for your customer’s information in exchange for a ticket to an event, a discount, a free trial, more information, etc. They are helpful because you will be able to add their contact info to your CRM, and then follow up with them. The last example is coupons or promo codes. These entice the customer to spend money with you and are easily trackable.
Long-term marketing is the process of using marketing tactics that produce non-revenue-centric outcomes that have the
There are also a plethora of long-term marketing tactics that your business can take advantage of. Search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, and organic social media content are all great options. For example, when you make a change to your website that will improve your SEO, it can take a few months to make an impact on your website traffic. Content creation is similar to SEO, as when you share blogs, articles, etc on your website, it will take a while to generate a decent amount of traffic organically. Finally, organic social media content will make your company’s social media appear more legitimate. Plus, the more consistent you are, the more followers you will be able to generate over time. But we all know follower count takes a long time to go up.
Of course! There can be an overlap between long-term and short-term marketing tactics. A few examples of this are social media advertising, trade shows, and email marketing. For social media advertising, you will see views, engagements, and maybe even some conversions within a few days of posting. At the same time, social media ads will continue to engage with your leads as long as you don’t turn them off or they surpass your budget.
When considering which tactic to use for your organization, consider the following:
As mentioned above, you should use a combination of short-term and long-term tactics. That will allow your company to grow immediately, and over time. When you figure out what tactics peak your interest, just ensure you are setting goals and using metrics to measure the success of your marketing initiatives.