Short Term vs. Long Term Digital Marketing Strategies
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| Photo by Artem Podrez from Pexels |
The business world is moving digital. Long gone are the days where mailers and sales representatives fueled each business. The digital transformation is here, and small businesses need to adapt their traditional marketing techniques to suit digital marketing strategies.
Digital marketing strategies can help fuel sales, but they can also be expensive: business owners may feel pressured to spend extra money and time to create effective strategies.
At AlchemyThree, we help people build upon their digital marketing strategies to create an effective plan that works for their goals. Here’s everything you need to know about building a solid marketing strategy - and the difference between short-term and long-term marketing strategies.
Why is a solid marketing strategy important?
Small business owners managing it all on their own may be struggling to dedicate the proper amount of time to marketing. After all, there’s a chance that you are not a marketing expert - and you may feel uncomfortable tackling a foreign subject.
Why is a marketing strategy even important? A comprehensive plan will help you build your brand and achieve your goals as a business - and the marketing plan will help create a blueprint for getting to these goals. Your strategy can help organize your scarce resources to build upon the best opportunities and ultimately help increase sales, brand awareness, and more.
What are the types of digital marketing objectives?
To better build a successful brand and grow your small business, you need to have clear digital marketing objectives.
What sort of goals and objectives should you aim for?
- Continuous new, high-quality leads
- Grow your sales
- Build your brand (name recognition and brand values)
- Reducing the overall cost of customer acquisition
Should your business focus on short term or long term marketing strategies?
Many small business owners already have a digital marketing strategy in place. But not every small business considers their strategy in terms of short-term and long-term goals. Have you crafted your strategy to deliver results within certain timeframes? Some business owners may expect results in a few months when their strategy works better with a long-term time frame.
It’s important to understand exactly what strategies will earn results in fast - and slow - time frames to help determine how exactly you can maximize your efforts. After all, most small business owners don’t have unlimited time to focus on marketing alone.
For example: if you want to focus on building your brand and getting a new product off the ground, don’t use strategies that focus exclusively on long-term results. To get the best results, no matter your goals, you should be using a combination of short-term and long-term marketing strategies.
Short-term strategies, for example, may include the following techniques:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Geofenced advertising
- Social media ads
Long-term digital strategies may include the following techniques:
- Web design and optimization
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Read on to learn more about these marketing strategies in action.
What are some short-term marketing strategies?
Short-term marketing strategies may help your sales - but only for a limited time.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Paid advertising is one of the fastest ways to generate sales and traffic to your website, and a common short-term marketing strategy. Some of the most popular ways to do PPC include Google Adwords and Facebook Lead Ads.
PPC ads are all about attracting users to the platform with a type of payment when they click on the ads. In fact, you’ve probably clicked on several ads without even knowing it, because of the rewards presented. This technique is the best way to generate traffic (and sales) through online marketing. You should expect to spend around $300 to see some types of results, but you can easily spend more and if you need assistance in you can ask any best B2B PPC Agency online or near you.
Geofenced Ads
Geofenced ads can help attract customers by targeting users within specific geographic boundaries. These PPC ads appear when users enter a predetermined geographic boundary for your ads. For example, a local bakery can target every shopper that might walk by a mile of your shop each day.
This ad will be triggered when someone steps within your virtual boundaries, but it pays off when someone walks by your store as well. This short-term strategy will start working immediately, but if you want to benefit from the foot traffic, you need to start using this strategy long-term.
Social media ads and limited time promotions
Limited promotions can make a big difference in your short-term digital marketing strategy. Social media promos, gifts-on-purchase, referral incentives, and general discounts can all help boost sales - and may even create loyal customers over time. These promotions work by setting a time limit to increase urgency. Customers will rush to make purchases to get those discounts, boosting sales over a short period of time.
What are some long term marketing strategies?
Short-term strategies can be temporary. For sustained results, try these long-term digital marketing strategies.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the most important things you can do for your business, but many business owners and leaders struggle to build an effective SEO strategy for their website. Online marketing works best when you target specific audiences and nail down frequency on search engine pages.
The best way to do this: proper SEO techniques for your website.
Once your business identifies a niche, you need to work on the key words associated with that niche and learn how your audience searches for products or services. Potential customers might trust your brand more - or at least click on your link - if you appear in search engine results.
Customizing your website is crucial, especially when there are billions of websites on the internet. It’s simple: higher visibility on search engines means better chances of sales. If you do SEO right, you’ll cut costs on your other digital marketing costs.
Social Media Management
Social media may seem like a “nice to have” part of your business, but it’s key for digital marketing. Managing your social media effectively can be both short-term and long-term, depending on how you do it.
You can get quick results from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, among others. But the platforms also offer an opportunity to build your brand and gain a huge following. With a big following, you can increase your chance of sales over time. It’s time and effort, especially over the long-term, but it pays off big time. The best part of this strategy? With a big social media following, you won’t spend any money while your social media networks generate sales.
Content marketing
Content creation is a big part of your digital marketing strategy as well. It all comes down to customization: how can you suit your current content to your potential customers?
This strategy works best in tandem with SEO techniques. You should be identifying keywords and tailoring content around those keywords to build your content. You may need to regularly update content to match business trends.
Which works for your business?
Marketing is an irreplaceable part of any growing business, and even with a successful business, you still need to work for your success. Being creative and building upon these digital marketing strategies has the potential to elevate your content in the crowded online world.
The digital business world is more interesting and effective; however, you are still expected to work for your success. Marketing is irreplaceable in any business; you have to be creative and apply relevant techniques to rise above the flooding online world.