Your marketing strategy can be the difference between creating a highly successful, rapidly growing company or being left behind. A strong strategy can keep your business at the forefront of the minds of your customers and prospects. While short-term campaigns are key in gaining quick results, long-term plans help you achieve sustainable business growth.
In this post, we’re going to identify and explain the significance of three key long-term marketing strategies that you simply can’t overlook. Before we do that, let’s quickly explain what long-term marketing tactics are.
What is a long-term marketing strategy?
A long-term marketing strategy is one that focuses on brand awareness and sustainable results. Unlike PPC or email marketing, long-term plans help you survive and thrive down the road.
Most businesses, especially eCommerce platforms, want to grow overnight. They run quick campaigns like PPC, or limited time offers to quickly garner sales but don’t develop a long-term plan. This approach could lead to uncertainty and a lack of direction. This is where you need to develop long-term marketing strategies.
3 Critical long-term marketing strategies
Although tactics like PPC or promotions are important, they only offer temporary boosts. The moment you stop your promotions or PPC campaigns, leads or sales will stop coming in. The following longer term strategies will keep your business buoyant for years to come:
1. Good SEO is a long game
Search engine optimization (SEO) is most definitely a long-term marketing plan. You can’t get your website ranked higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) overnight or even in a few months, especially when you’re operating in a competitive environment.
SEO is a must-have component of any progressive business that needs a solid online presence. There’s no way you can grow your organic website traffic unless you have a solid SEO strategy in place. If you’re not sure why SEO is a long-term commitment, look at the process of building website authority.
Building page authority is a time-consuming process. The longer your site’s URL exists, the more brand authority and backlinks you can build up. Since you need backlinks to help search engines understand and trust your website, you must spend considerable time gaining those valuable backlinks.
Also, competition for organic ranking is fierce. You can’t jump up to the first page or first 10 search results in a few weeks or months, especially if you have competitors who have been investing in SEO for a long time.
SEO is also an ongoing process – your SEO team is never done improving SEO. Nevertheless, you must pay SEO its due attention if you really want to beat the competition and grow your business down the line.
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is also a long-term marketing tactic that requires planning and careful execution. You have the freedom to adjust your content marketing plan according to your changing business needs. Here are some of the results you can achieve with a long-term content marketing strategy:
- Enhanced lead generation and conversion
- Better ranking on Google
- Opportunities to build customer trust and loyalty
- Improved brand awareness
Businesses and marketers who treat content marketing as a sprint rather than a marathon often end up creating a few low-quality blog posts and get nothing in return. The majority of businesses fail at content marketing because of their inability to understand how it really works and how much time they need to invest in it.
If you want your efforts to ensure better rankings, improved conversions, and engaged readers, then develop a long-term, strategic content marketing plan. Now, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to the duration of a successful content marketing plan. It might take you 6 months or a year to start getting returns on your efforts.
As a part of your ongoing marketing efforts, you keep nurturing prospects and both new and existing customers with valuable content. Let’s take an interesting example to understand this.
Imagine you go on a diet to lose weight. For the first couple of weeks, you eat clean, green foods and exercise regularly. As a result, you see some signs of success and feel great about yourself. However, you stop your diet plan after two weeks and fall back into your old, unhealthy lifestyle.
What do you think will happen after that? Obviously, you’ll start gaining weight again and your physical fitness takes a nosedive. Content marketing is just like your diet plan, it needs to be consistent and long-term.
3. Social media
Almost every business has some kind of social media presence these days. Unfortunately, not all of them are seeing the real benefits because they don’t have a long-term plan. Signing up on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn is just the first step. You must be clear about your social media goals and strategies. Just having a presence on the platforms isn’t enough.
Running paid social campaigns is a short-term strategy. However, when it comes to building a sound presence and meaningful customer relationships, you need to invest time and resources.
Social media is one of the top ways consumers interact with brands and look for services. Therefore, you have to be there whenever your business, or your audience needs it.
Conclusion
What’s clear is that your business needs a long-term marketing plan that covers all the major aspects of modern marketing: SEO, content marketing, social media, etc. There is a lot to do, but by making use of the technology and tools that are available you can make things a lot easier to manage. For example, using marketing automation technologies can make many of your marketing tasks easier and more efficient.
Make sure you pay attention to these long-term components of your marketing plan.