One of the fun things about the early days of internet marketing was that almost everything seemed to happen instantly. You put a website or ad online, promoted it, and could be assessing the results within hours.
There is still an aspect of instant gratification to working on the web, but the process of designing websites, planning campaigns, placing ads, and (especially) evaluating results has begun to stretch out. And so, we have reached a point where online marketing has come to represent traditional marketing, in that businesses need to balance short and long-term strategies if they want to get the best results.
With that in mind, let’s look at a few ways you can get the most out of both…
Short Term Tactics Should Lead to Instant Feedback
If you’re simply looking to boost leads and sales, there are number of ways you can interact with buyers that can pay off quickly. In particular, PPC ads, and discount codes, and email blasts are all effective for helping you to reach large numbers of targeted buyers and have them (hopefully) respond within minutes or hours.
The downside to these tactics, however, is that once they have been executed, they don’t have much staying power. Your bulk of your email responses will show up in the first day or two, and discount codes usually come with an expiration date. In the same way, most buyers aren’t going to return again after clicking your online ad. They’ll make a decision to engage or not, and then move on.
Longer Term Activities Help You Grow Your Base of Customers
On the other end of the scale come search engine optimization, social media posting, and list-building activities. These rarely help you add any immediate revenue, but they do make it possible for you to cast a much wider net and attract buyers who might stick with you for years to come.
We all know by now that search engine optimization can take weeks or months before lots of new visitors start showing up. Social posting builds brand awareness and customer loyalty, but is generally ineffective in a transactional sense. And adding names to your email subscriber list (usually through free information products) doesn’t help you get cash now, but makes it possible for you to get more responses later.
Bringing Short and Long Term Tactics Together
When trying to determine your focus, and build campaigns that work, it’s important to pay attention to the short-term and the long-term.
Without short-term ads, emails, and buyer incentives, it’s incredibly difficult to turn your fans and subscribers into paying customers. All businesses run on revenue, and short-term tactics put cash in your pocket.
At the same time, longer-term strategies are needed to make those short-term campaigns more effective. The more subscribers you have, and the more visitors you can bring to your website, the more profitable your business becomes over time. So, you don’t want to focus so tightly on revenue that you miss out on bigger areas of growth.
Ideally, both parts of your campaign should work together and sync, reinforcing each other so that you’re always generating new sales, but that the trend for those sales is on an upward arc from one month to the next. If that’s not happening in your business, then maybe it’s time to work with a creative team who can nudge you in the right direction. Call or email us today to see how we can help!