The hard reality is that marketing is about playing the long game. Way before customers ever see your marketing, you and your team should have been hard at work setting the groundwork, reviewing the strategy, and putting the pieces into place. And even when a new marketing plan goes into action, it can be weeks or months before success can be measured. Today, we’re looking at marketing momentum and why short-term marketing often yields such poor results.
Short-Term & Spaghetti Marketing
While any marketing is usually better than none, marketing made without plans—including research, goals, and timelines—will lead to frustration. Short-term marketing, where you’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and impatiently moving on if you don’t get results, wastes time and money.
Some examples might include:
- One-Off Ads: Advertising is a marketing essential, but you need to measure twice and cut once with ads. Targeting, budget, and copy should all be reviewed to make sure you’re not wasting money.
- Setting Up (But Not Managing) Online Profiles: Making sure you’ve claimed pages on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and more is vital. But if you don’t use active reputation management, the bad reviews will stack up.
- Quick Social Media Posts: Social media marketing is a must for most businesses, and that requires posting. But posting without a plan, a calendar, and from the cuff can hurt your brand.
- Using 100% AI AI-Generated Content: AI is a tool, but when you’re using generative text and images right out of the box, it’s super obvious and will get you labeled as AI slop.
What Long-Term Marketing Looks Like
Successful marketing is a long game, measured in months instead of days, analyzed in quarters, and compared to years. The most successful marketing is meticulously planned out, executed, revised, and adjusted. Some of it is visible, and some is like an iceberg: 90% of it has a major impact while not being apparent. It’s the constant work—the marketing momentum that builds over weeks and months—that makes the biggest difference.
Starting with a Marketing Plan (and Marketing Agency)
All good marketing starts with a plan. A marketing plan reviews your business: its place in the marketing landscape, strengths and weaknesses, and who it does and should sell to. These are typically made by marketing agencies that have the experience to find and collate this data. Then, this information is used to create actionable marketing you can do to reach your goals. Want to learn more? Check out our blog, Making Marketing Plans: Measure Twice, Cut Once.
Working on SEO and Online Presence
Making your website show up on search results—and now AI answers—is unglamorous work, filled with working through website metadata, researching and executing countless business blogs, and making sure your website performance and hosting are outstanding. But this SEO (Search Engine Optimization), combined with a holistic monitoring and management of your brand online, is what will gain you reliable traffic and sales.
Building up Social Media and Email Followers
Jumping into social media, even as an established brand, takes time, energy, and strategy. This isn’t about going viral; this is about putting in the regular work, building the social media calendars, taking engaging photos and video, and responding and reacting to the community you’re building. It’s about building up those followers who engage with everything you see, similarly to building up an email subscriber list and using it for newsletters and more.
Advertising and Analytics
Running ads can feel like a silver bullet, but there isn’t a faster way to lose money when it’s done incorrectly. Ads need work, especially when it comes to targeting those ads, before you can start. Weigh your budgets, platforms, and available content to find the best options, then put in the work. After ads start running (and after marketing starts in general), reviewing the analytics is priceless, from seeing where traffic is coming from to your site to how ads are driving lead generation.
Good marketing is a lot of work—often too much work for a small or mid-sized business to sustain for the time needed to build momentum. This is where marketing agencies like Vision come in. We’ll work with you to analyze your business, recommend the best marketing options, and execute a plan that
