Are Your Short-Term Marketing Goals Killing Your Long-Term?
When you're building and managing a brand, you always have an eye on the future. You can’t get to where you want to go without plotting a course to get there. Marketing goals are top of mind when it comes to future planning, but occasionally the long-term view can slip from view when working on the here and now.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how focus on your short-term goals could kill your long-term goals and what steps to take to keep everything in balance.
Understanding Short-Term vs. Long-Term Marketing Goals
It doesn’t matter if it's a start-up in grandma’s basement or a Fortune 500 with a gleaming tower in Manhattan–marketing plans are built, budgets are allocated, and goals are set.
Until they aren’t. Because sometimes, marketing budgets can shift to other places, like operations, or customer service, or donuts for casual Friday, or any other part of the business.
When this happens, at best, you’ll be successful in hitting your short-term goals with your long-term goals delayed. The worst-case scenario is, sadly, the most common one. You focus solely on hitting your short-term goals, but before you know it, short-term oriented marketing becomes the new norm. This, effectively, kills the long-term ones.
All the while, your more aggressive competitors slowly increase brand awareness, and your market share shrivels like a snowman in Mississippi summer. No one wants that to happen (except your competitors). So, how do you keep your short-term marketing goals from killing your long-term growth?
Make the Value of Your Short-Term Goals and Spends Clear
Let’s start by targeting spends in your short-term marketing goals that can provide quick and trackable results. Short-term goals should be things you can achieve in weeks or months that lay track toward where you want your brand to be in the long term. The goals should include things like:
- Driving web traffic
- Growing lead generation
- Optimizing conversions
Next, think twice about shifting some funds to those short-terms that don’t offer results as trackable. The kind of things that are hard to say no to because “Didn’t we do that last year?” Never the best reason to continue a bad strategy.
Let’s Not Forget About Those Long-Term Marketing Goals
Long-terms goals define where you’d like your brand to be in the future. Think one, two years, or even further out. These are goals that are trackable, but you aren’t going to see the fruits of your efforts as quickly. Some examples of these goals are:
- Building brand awareness
- Growing your brand’s authority in your sector
- Fostering your customer experience
The Pitfalls of Overemphasis on Short-Term Goals
Don't feel like putting effort into current customers, driving sales, and tracking your ROI (return on investment) is a bad idea because it’s not. When it becomes your only idea, you’re in trouble. Your brand becomes vulnerable to:
- Losing relevance with future customers
- Never building relevance
- Making lower prices or discounts the only driver for customer loyalty
- Low brand awareness versus aggressive competitors
How to Balance Your Long-Term Goals as You Spend on Short Term
Getting buy-in from all stakeholders on the long-term goals is the first step. Next, work on defining the short-term goals and tactics that provide clear direction to your destination.
Identify customer trends and market forecasts that you’ll use to evolve your long-term goals as needed, part of which should be scoping out your key competitor’s strategies and spends.
Determine channels and tactics you can use to drive and track those aforementioned short-terms while supporting your long-term goals. Equally important is figuring out those that don’t support them.
After there’s some synergy between your tactics, work on setting funds aside that allow for flexibility should you require it. Murphy’s Law just about guarantees something won’t go as planned. And who knows? Greater opportunities might pop up, and it’s always best to have cash at hand to pivot.
Make sure all stakeholders understand and buy in to the long-term goal first, then define the short-term goals and tactics that provide clear stepping stones to that destination.
Identify customer trends and market forecasts that you’ll use to affirm or evolve your direction for the long term. Discover as much as you can about key competitor strategies and spends.
Determine channels and tactics you can use for to drive and track short-term goals while supporting your long-term goals. Equally important: determine channels and tactics that won’t support your long-term goals, and make sure your stakeholders agree.
Once you have short-term and long-term tactics and spends aligned, set funds aside for agility and flexibility. Not everything will go as planned, and opportunities emerge.
Now you’re in the best place possible. Your brand has a strategic short and long-term plan with balanced spends and the nimbleness to outsmart your competition when opportunities arise.
Case Studies and Examples
Mad Genius has worked with a few brands to align long-term and short-goals to great success. Our Target Zero safety campaign for Ergon, Mississippi's largest privately owned company, comes to mind. The short-term goal was pretty clear: raise awareness of work place safety. Easy enough to do, but the campaign also had to push the long-term strategy of reducing accidents.
For a sales example, we can look to Colsons Beer Company, a local beer brand that had a few goals in mind. Our branding strategy looked to address the short-term goal of getting into stores and driving sales, with the long-term goal of building brand loyalty.
It can be a challenge to keep your marketing goals in balance. With sound strategy, pushing your short-term goals shouldn’t at the expense of your long-term goals. Mad Genius knows a thing or two about getting goals on track. Fill out the form below and speak with a genius to learn how we can help you.