Marketing strategies: Long vs Short term
Marketing is essential for exposure and growth of whatever it is you want to create awareness and interest around. Whether you are a small business that desires to get the word out about your product or services or a creative person wanting to build hype about a new project you are launching… investing time and energy into your marketing approaches is how you will help bring exposure and interest to your business pursuits. Within this article I breakdown the differences between long and short term marketing, including how each type can help you ultimately create more sustainability within your business.
Long and short term marketing strategies both have their benefits. Yet, for anyone wanting to create sustainable, long term, and ongoing success with their marketing efforts, it’s important to understand the difference between these types of strategies and how you can incorporate them into your marketing. When I first began marketing my business online, I wasn’t yet aware of the importance of investing time and energy into long term marketing. Though I had plenty of people recommend long term marketing approaches, they felt a bit overwhelming to me and I also lacked the patience to go all in on them. Instead, for the first several years that I marketed my business online, I primarily focused on short term marketing strategies. This looked like pouring the bulk of my marketing efforts into social media, particularly Instagram and Facebook.
Though I didn’t get very involved in paid advertising, I did however spend a great deal of time creating and sharing value-based content that built a strong organic reach and active online community. My short term marketing methods seemed to be working, as my business experienced continual growth year after year…so I didn’t yet understand the value of long term marketing. After several years into my online marketing journey, I started getting pretty burnt out with social media. I was tired of feeling like I had to be a content creating machine and I was getting annoyed with feeling like I had to constantly be ON in order for my marketing to work. At this point in time I began looking into other ways to market my business that could allow me to feel more creative as well as more limitless. Social media marketing began to feel extremely restrictive to me because I have always loved to write and I have a lot to say! Yet, being bound to character limits, ever changing platform features and constantly evolving algorithms left me feeling like I was spending more time trying to keep up with the social media game than I was actually producing my passion fueled work.
Realizing my frustration and burn out brought me to becoming curious about focusing more of my time and energy on things like podcasting, blogging and email marketing. I had tried to focus on email marketing many times, yet I hadn’t yet figured out my own flow and way I wanted to approach it, causing me to always end up being inconsistent with it. I decided to go all in on developing consistency muscles around my email marketing, starting by simply sending out one high value newsletter a month. I then went on to launch a podcast where I released high value episodes twice a month. My goal was to not produce a ton of content in these more long form marketing channels, but rather, produce quality content that I absolutely loved creating. After a few years of building consistency with podcasting and email marketing, I then decided to add in blogging. Throughout this time I was also an active Pinterest user and was working to consistently build up my Pinterest platform to help increase my website traffic organically. Once I added in writing two blog articles a month on top of my consistent podcasting and email marketing, I really started seeing a change in how I felt toward marketing as a whole.
I started feeling so much more expansive and noticed that I had so much more free space and time to create what I wanted to create instead of spending so much of my capacity on social media alone. Focusing on long term marketing strategies actually re-ignited a lot of joy and passion for creating content as well as provided me with the freedom to create MY way instead of the way social media was forcing me to create. By the time I began consistently podcasting, blogging and writing newsletters, I was able to start producing more quality content that actually made my social media marketing far easier to plan and manage. I work with my signature macro-to-micro marketing methodology within my own business, so applying that to how I created long term and short term marketing campaigns really started streamlining my entire marketing department!
I didn’t realize the value in long term marketing until I started producing long form marketing materials consistently over time. It took a solid year of consistently blogging, podcasting and writing newsletters to my email community for me to start seeing just how impactful long term marketing is for my business. I began noticing that my website traffic consistently kept going up, primarily due to my podcast, articles and pinterest strategies. I noticed people began finding me and discovering my work from other platforms besides social media. I noticed people began reaching out to me to collaborate in really cool ways all because they stumbled upon a piece of writing I shared or an audio I crafted. This excited me because it was evidence that long term marketing plants seeds that last and produce fruits far greater than social media (which is short term marketing) does. Ultimately, my own experiences with long term and short term marketing helped me grasp just how much more of a sustainable business practice long form marketing methods are compared to short form. To this day, I cannot preach enough to the power of investing your time and energy into establishing long term marketing campaigns!
What is short term marketing?
I relate short term marketing to a short-sighted and ‘quick results’ style of marketing. Usually when you are setting up short term marketing strategies, you’re thinking about a smaller window of time such as your daily, weekly, or monthly marketing goals. When establishing short term marketing, you’re thinking about the near future, not the long term.
Social media can be considered both a short term and a long term marketing channel, all depending on how you use social media. In my opinion, social media leans more towards short term marketing in relation to how most people use it. In order to use social media channels as a long term marketing strategy, you have to think beyond social media…where social media is just a portal or entry point into other things that are outside of or off social platforms.
Other short term marketing strategies could include marketing a one-time event, webinar or workshop. The key to understanding short term marketing is that the point of it is not to live on forever or have a sustainable, long term impact. The lifecycle of short term marketing is short and not very regenerative. An example of this is posting content on Instagram. Your content gets the most visibility and thus drives the most results within the first 24-48 hours. After that, the results that content produces lessens(or can even stop completely!). For sustainability’s sake, prioritizing short term marketing alone is the least sustainable way to market. This doesn’t mean it’s not helpful or effective, it just means that your marketing needs more than just short term strategies.
I spent the first several years marketing my business solely from a short term marketing approach. It goes without saying that short term marketing has its benefits, from giving you the sense of instant gratification to being a great way to fluff your ego! It also can be a wonderful way to attract clients and build community. I’m not knocking the power of short term marketing as it has benefited me in more ways than one. What I am saying is that short term marketing can only get you so far…and it also requires a lot more output of energy and time. With how much social media constantly changes anymore, short term marketing can become quite the headache and source of frustration if it’s the only type of marketing you’re focusing on.
What is long term marketing?
I view long term marketing as a more ‘big picture’ or ‘whole systems’ approach to marketing. Establishing a long term marketing strategy requires setting longer term goals and thinking longer term in your windows of time you give yourself to market. Long term marketing strategies can (and usually do!) include short term marketing strategies, but there are more things happening and more steps being taken in long term marketing so as to create a more sustainable, consistent ripple of results and impact over time.
Long term marketing is not a sprint approach, whereas short term sort of is! This type of marketing isn’t typically as popular in that it doesn't provide people with the satisfaction of immediate results…making this type of marketing something that needs trust and patience! Long term marketing, though, is what helps you create long term, continual results. What i’ve found is this type of marketing also helps you reduce your workload over time.
The more you invest time and energy in long term marketing, the more seeds you plant that can then be cultivated, nurtured, and grown. Combining both short term and long term marketing approaches into your marketing strategies is what I find to be the most effective way of creating a sustainable marketing strategy as a whole.
Examples of long term marketing could include prioritizing learning SEO and doing keyword research to then apply to your blogging, podcasting, video creation, and so on. Blogging, podcasting, and youtube videos are great examples of long term marketing channels to establish because these styles of content live on much longer than, say, social media content does. You can gain benefits of these types of marketing for years and years after the marketing content is created.
Pinterest is another favorite long term marketing strategy of mine! Another example of long term marketing is to have a service or product that is continually offered and/or available that you can market over and over without it expiring. This could be a signature offering that is part of your core service suite.
When I switched into prioritizing long term marketing, I noticed just how much more joy and fun I was having in creating content! I felt liberated from the rules of social media and no longer felt confined to have to create content in a very specific way in order to get any visibility or exposure on it. Long form marketing also has opened many doors for me that short term marketing hadn’t been doing, such as incredible collaborations, partnerships and paid freelance work opportunities.
A hybrid approach to marketing
Creating a hybrid approach to marketing is what can create the most sustainability within your marketing efforts. A hybrid approach is established when we apply and practice multiple or varying styles of marketing instead of just taking one single marketing approach. There are many other types of marketing outside of just short and long term as I covered here. Some of my favorites include collaboration marketing, email marketing, and conversational marketing and disruptive innovation marketing!
What I recommend for anyone wanting to expand their strategies for how they market their small business online is to get playful and creative! What I find to be really important is to consider not what is trending or most popular in terms of how most people market their work, but rather, how you personally love to create! The more you are in alignment with your unique and signature style for how you want to create and share valuable content online, the easier you’ll find it is to bring people into your work. When we force ourselves to follow the rules or play rigged games just to get seen or gain exposure, it almost always will end with us feeling depleted, uninspired and burnt out. Marketing can be (and is!) a really fun part of being an online business owner, but it requires us to get real with how we personally want to be creating content and marketing ourselves.
It’s important to consider ways that you can establish a hybrid marketing strategy that allows you to market yourself in many different ways…ultimately helping you to gain exposure and reach from many different mediums! This doesn’t mean you have to create different content for every platform you are marketing on, either. It’s all about working smarter instead of harder and allowing your long form marketing content to work for you in many different ways! One of my favorite techniques to use, macro-to-micro marketing, allows me to create one very potent and high value piece of content in long format and then convert that larger piece of content into many smaller pieces that then can be spread over many different channels!
The best thing you can do if you are in the realm of wanting to reshape your marketing approaches is to get clear on what channels you want to market on and what mediums you are most interested in creating marketing content in. Once you nail that down, you can begin planning out your long form marketing content first and letting that support you in establishing your short from content from there!
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Until next time…
Natalie Brite