A one-off, siloed marketing campaign often fails to properly consider wider market conditions and company strategies. Businesses that want long-term value must plan on a macro scale. Here’s the basics…
There are two ways you can think about your company’s marketing campaigns: short-term and long-term. I don’t need to tell you which one usually adds the most value.
Yet it’s still tempting to take a shortcut and roll out a short-sighted, siloed activity, especially when you…
- need to boost the sales pipeline
- have some budget that needs to be spent before a date
- are urged to respond quickly to a business need
We’re not saying there’s never a good case for an ad-hoc campaign, but these occasional, one-off situations can turn into bad habits if you aren’t careful. It’s dangerous to think of marketing as a set of boxes to tick each quarter, rather than as an investment that needs the biggest ROI possible.
Here’s why long-term strategic thinking is vital to marketing success, and how you can get back to basics if you’ve fallen into the short-term marketer’s trap.
Why think bigger?
“Keep it simple” is a maxim that works in many areas of business. Short-term, one-off campaigns would seem to be simpler to plan, carry out and measure than long-term ones. So, what gives? Why is thinking bigger better?
Imagine you need to create a campaign to launch a new product. The KPI is the number of leads generated. You could create new assets, target new prospects and drive them into a new sales funnel. You may be lucky and hit a number of prospects ready to buy.
Also consider what your company is already doing that could support this goal? Do you already have useful leads, assets, offers, campaigns? Could you actually achieve your goal with less effort by refining and enhancing what already exists?
“Consider that it takes time to nurture leads, to guide prospects through their buying journey, and to realise maximum opportunities.”
And what about your company’s broader objectives – like gaining market share and increasing awareness? If this campaign supports them too it will deliver far more value than a simple, siloed tactic.
There’s also context to consider. Research into the macro environment – demographic, economic and other forces – will help your campaign stand out and return more value, for longer. And your research insights can be applied to many campaigns, not just this one.
Get back to basics
To achieve success in your campaigns, you need to take it back to basics. These fundamental steps help the capability and longevity of your campaigns!
Here are the steps to take you there:
- Do your research – Make sure you understand your customers’ buying behaviours, the competitive landscape and how sales cycles flow. Build your campaign around these insights.
- Build on customer knowledge – Leverage company knowledge about customers’ preferences and buying habits to identify effective messages. Evolve customer profiles to inform future campaigns.
- Keep evolving content – Make use of existing assets, but also create versatile/evergreen content that could serve future campaigns. Above all, ensure you have the right content mapped to each stage of the buying journey that is targeted to engage your audience in a meaningful way.
- Make it scalable – Design a campaign that can be extended or scaled out if proven successful. Don’t just think about running campaigns for longer. Consider how you could scale them out to new geographies, or even re-use effective campaigns for other products.
- Review and learn – Make sure you capture insights that can help this campaign and future activities, perform better. Test messages, test effectiveness of different channels; and be prepared to adapt your campaign in market to get the best results.
These techniques are at the heart of the integrated campaigns we deliver for some of the world’s biggest technology companies.
At TBT we use this approach to help our clients optimise their investments, creating campaigns that deliver more value over longer periods. It’s not rocket science – it’s back-to-basics marketing with the fundamentals well thought through.
If you’d like help shifting your approach from short-term tactics to long-term strategy, feel free to chat to us. Give us a call on +44 (0)1373 469270 or email us at hello@tbtmarketing.com.
