A successful future for your business begins with the marketing efforts you make today.
There’s a saying I use to describe the mission of our account executives. They need to keep their clients “looking down at the road and not at their feet” when it comes to marketing. This is a quick way to say several things, the most important of which is that if you’re looking at your feet and judging each step, you’re missing the reasons you’re walking at all.
When it comes to marketing, short-term thinking is poison, though I understand where it comes from and why it feels like the correct move. The reason this saying even exists is because short-term thinking is a common phenomenon. Marketing can seem like an unnecessary expense until the moment it appears to be your only way out of very real business problems.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations who recognize the requirement of marketing, but its ambiguity can create a fair amount of discomfort. Every little detail is deliberated upon so much that no forward motion is happening at all.
When marketing is new territory, it’s hard to know the best approach—so overthinking and extreme caution feels correct. If you find yourself in either of these camps, I’m going to ask you to operate in a way that feels counterintuitive.
In the following sections, you’ll see why focusing on forward momentum and long-term goals is the only way to intentionally find the success you’re after.
The Pitfalls of Short-Term Thinking in Marketing
Many, if not all, agencies have clients who come to us in a panic. Numbers are down and immediate survival is at stake. Most companies don’t think they need marketing until it’s their only option to save their quarter—or worse—their businesses viability. This anxiety triggers a panic response that causes clients to want to fight their way out of a big problem, and while fighting can appear noble, this panic response actually bypasses the thinking brain, and the results can cause even more damage to the business.
In full disclosure, I’ve been there with my own business ventures. It’s terrifying and I have the utmost respect for any human who is braving the journey of entrepreneurship. It’s a rollercoaster for most. When things are heading down, you’re likely to ask yourself “How do we not crash?” Plan for these moments. They are going to occur.
If you react to every dip you will never be planning for long-term success, you’re simply planning for the moment when you’re not in fear. This is only going to be as good as your next instance of trepidation. This thinking is fraught with a broad and inaccurate assumption: That there’s something that you can do to trigger quick sales that you haven’t already done for your business.
For this to be true, a slew of hungry buyers would have to be waiting for your solution to appear, ready to trust your brand, sight unseen, and give you their money without any deep consideration. “Where have you been all this time?!” they’ll say, and, whew, all of your problems are gone.
If this scenario sounds fanciful, that’s because it is. In order for this to be true, you need:
- No other competitors in the marketplace (or at least none actively pursuing their prospects).
- An abundant audience of consumers who are facing their moment of truth, i.e., they have a defined problem and they need your solution now.
- Enough trust and understanding in your solution to invest in your product without ever having heard of you.
I suppose this wholly unrealistic scenario could happen, though if so, you’re likely not in a panic because selling is easy. Your bigger problem is figuring out how you’re going to stave off competition since you’ve cornered an audience-rich vertical that has no competitors. (You’ll still need marketing in this scenario as well.)
You may have the opposite problematic scenario where you feel like you have the budget, time, and need for marketing but you’re unable to make a decision for fear of making the wrong one. After all, if you’re responsible for the paychecks of your organization, you may have to report to a board of directors who may consider your quick decisions as haphazard or reckless. Or maybe you were previously burned by charlatans posing as partners, and now you demand that your agency earns your trust by bringing you bulletproof plans that you intend to test, firing endless bullets before ever putting the plan in front of your target market.
The result of this behavior is wasted money with no opportunity for results. The single biggest threat to your organization’s marketing isn’t bad marketing, it’s no marketing at all. Every day that plans or creative assets sit in your inbox awaiting approval is a day of lost visibility in the marketplace. You can’t win a sale if you can’t be considered, and you can’t be considered if you’re not visible to your audience.
To build on that, it’s important to understand that it’s extremely unlikely that you are your own target audience. You are the supply side. The demand side (your audience) likely has different needs and values in their journey to buy a solution. The way to understand what works for them is to get ideas and messages into the marketplace and observe whether they’re responding to your campaigns or not.
Luckily, great marketers never fail, they learn. They go out to the market and try again with something different in order to truly understand what prompts their audiences into action. This simply can’t happen if a campaign is never allowed to run because a stakeholder expects it to be perfect on the front end.
Short-Term Marketing in Action
Bud Light, by their own VP of Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid’s account, was facing a declining brand and they needed to find a way to tap into the emerging Gen Z market to “evolve and elevate” their brand. To meet the audience where they’re at, they focused on inclusion and representation. As a result, they made a Bud Light can celebrating transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s “Day 365 of Womanhood,” a bold leap for a brand known more for football and fraternal behavior than celebrating gender fluidity. Whether this campaign would’ve been groundbreaking or one of the biggest blunders in marketing history is left to an unwritten history because the real blunder occurred aftward.
As expected (and probably intended at some level), this was a polarizing move that outraged traditional fans. What did Bud Light do? They panicked. They scraped every mention they could of the controversy and refused to address it. Within days, the new audiences they were hoping to attract were fully rejecting the brand for not digging in their heels to support the trans community. At the same time, their existing (and aging) fan base of traditionalists was declaring that Bud Light had lost them forever. Heinerscheid lost her job, Bud Light issued a non-apology, and no good came from this panic. Whatever you believe the right move would have been, we can all agree Bud Light didn’t do it.
I don’t blame Heinerscheid. She likely expected or even counted on—a controversy and it’s likely that the people above her couldn’t handle the heat. Rather than building inroads with an emerging market and planning for their next generations of beer drinkers, they took all of their customer relationships back several years.
The Critical Need to Think Long-Term
Your best competitors are in the marketplace right now earning brand recognition and trust. Sometimes this is happening years before a sale takes place. Cisco is a Super Bowl sponsor, which requires a massive investment to gain visibility. It would be a leap for Cisco to expect a direct attributable ROI to this marketing action, especially given how often their customers make a buying decision to purchase their products, which is anywhere between 5 to 7 years. Cisco isn’t waiting for that customer or buying committee to perform a Google search when it’s time to upgrade a router to earn trust and state a unique value proposition. Instead, they are investing in building brand trust and making the case to choose them right now so the customer will choose them when the moment of truth occurs. The longer they focus on making that case to their market, the further ahead of their competitors they are.
Think about your own category. I’d bet that the market leaders that you’re challenged with overcoming aren’t relying on a single marketing tactic, nor are they only concerned with the sales that are taking place in the coming days or weeks. Instead, they have a strong marketing mix of tactics that address the awareness, consideration, and loyalty stages of the customer journey. The business that’s willing to do that, and do it consistently, is most likely to win the sale when the time comes, especially over a competitor who is only willing to show up right at the end.
Think about Coca-Cola. Yes, it’s consumer facing and low-cost, but that’s precisely what makes them a great case study here. Cola is sold in a traditional sales channel environment. Many of us have never consciously purchased Coke directly from the company itself, but through retailers.
Coke has been the top selling Cola brand, and overall soda brand through their various other SKUs, since 2004. This didn’t just happen. Coke spent $327m in advertising in 2022 vs Pepsi’s $204m investment. Why? Coke is so widely known that its brand name has come to represent the entire category of soft drinks in regions of the US. Just visit the South and order “A Coke?” and they’ll ask you what kind. Say “Pepsi” and it won’t even be a weird exchange. So, why would they need to not only continue to spend, but also to spend so much more than their competition?
They do this because they are focused on market dominance. At this stage, it’s about protecting their mindshare and keeping competitors out for today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. At some point, the investment was to capture that mindshare in the first place. They don’t want you thinking about competitors because you know Coke. You trust Coke. It’s a low risk, high reward choice. Pepsi can say the same thing, but do you believe it? Especially when Coke is first to mind? Pepsi’s challenge is to change your mind and that is a very tall order.
Are you asking a customer who has already made their decision to change their mind? Why would they?
The Direct-ROI Problem
Your next customer may not even be thinking about all of the different advertisements and marketing plays that have been placed in front of them. I’ve been on the internet all day (not a brag) and I couldn’t tell you a single ad I’ve seen, though I’m certain I’ve seen a lot of them. Am I being influenced? You can count on it. Am I conscious of who’s doing it? Not today, I’m not. As a consumer, I am delivering no direct ROI for those advertisers.
That’s completely reasonable, isn’t it? You’re not going to click on every single ad sent your way, nor mention every billboard you pass to the advertiser. Is search the only space where I make buying decisions? It sounds silly when viewed through that lens. Just because a tactic isn’t directly delivering value doesn’t mean that it has no value. It simply means that the value isn’t entirely clear.
That’s all well and good until it comes time to put investments on a spreadsheet or justify spend to a board. The first question to answer is this: Are you willing to lose the war against your best competitor? What about the next competitor ready for war? Are you willing to stay out of those fights for mindshare and survive off of the scraps? You’ll need to consider your run rate in the face of competitors who are willing to spend on tactics that deliver value that can’t be concretely traced back to revenue.
From the trenches, I’m here to tell you that the best marketing efforts are marketing mixes. They rely on not just showing up at the moment when a prospect realizes that they need your solution, but surrounding them by showing up in different mediums long before that moment arrives. That customer wouldn’t be able to attribute one source of communication to their decision-making process because it wasn’t one source that earned you that space at the top of that list.
Anecdotally, I asked a group of marketers to look at the Lowe’s refrigerator page and tell me which brands they would consider for purchase. Usual suspects such as Whirlpool, Maytag, and Bosch won consideration. No-name and less familiar brands weren’t even in contention. Ask yourself how often you need to buy a new refrigerator, and then ask yourself how long these top brands have been feeding you their brand messages and value propositions, just waiting for you to be 1) an adult 2) in the market for a refrigerator.
How to Look Down the Road
Dust Off (or Create) Your Business Plan
Thinking long-term might not be easy, especially if you are:
- In a cash crisis
- Uncomfortable with the efficacy of marketing
In either of these scenarios, I advise you to draft, review, or even revise a business plan. In most major municipalities, there are likely small business resources, including classes and mentorships, to help with this. You may also want to plug your business plan or desires into an AI like ChatGPT and ask it to help you create or revise your existing business plan. (Make sure to double-check the output.)
As someone who helps businesses everyday, I can’t over emphasize how much clarity a business plan can bring. It helps align your operations and expectations with your goals. It provides a plan to get you where you want to be and staves off misplaced disappointment.
Focus on Loyalty, Advocacy and Referral
If you’re feeling the financial pinch, remember that an existing customer is worth 10x a new customer. What can you offer to an audience who already has your trust and has experienced success with your products or services?
Additionally, 82% of small business clients come from referrals. Start reaching out to your customers and ask them directly for their referrals or set up an affiliate program. Personally, I think affiliate programs can feel a little bit like a bribe, so instead of paying a person directly for a referral, consider offering to make a donation in their name to a cause that helps the community.
At the end of the day, if this isn’t enough, you may need to consider how you can ease your cash crunch in ways that don’t involve new client acquisition, including loans and partnerships.
Steps to Adopting a Long-Term Marketing Mindset
- Focus on where you want to be this time next year. Try not to think about next week. How do you want your market to feel about you in 365 days? This is what your organization needs to build toward.
- Talk to your best customers. Ask them:
- how they first learned about you
- who else they considered
- how they first learned about your competitors
- what problem they had that led them to start seeking the solutions you offer
- why they ultimately chose your solutions
- how you’ve contributed to their success
- what industry emails they receive
- what conferences they attend.
You are aiming to learn everything you can about their journey to and with your business so that you can replicate it again and again.
- Set SMART goals. SMART goals are:
- Specific—Focus on what defines the difference between success and failure for your business. New customers? Market share? Product launches?
- Measurable—Pick a KPI that shows success with the specific goal.
- Actionable—You can do something to affect the goal, rather than relying on market conditions to suddenly change dramatically.
- Realistic—Do some research and make the case for why it’s achievable without being fantastical. Err on the side of conservative goals to set you and your team up for success.
- Time-bound—Give yourself realistic deadlines for achievement. This should hold you and your team accountable. Consider your prospect or customer buying cycles and timelines when setting those deadlines.
- Consider your marketing mix, especially against your best competitors. Where are they? Where aren’t they? Are they missing an opportunity? Don’t consider the financial implications just yet. Ask yourself, “Is this the right place to ultimately win these customers?”
- Create partnerships with companies that have relationships with your prospects. If you sell brooms and dustpans, think about partnering with a company that sells liquid floor cleaning products. If you provide cybersecurity services, consider companies that specialize in selling insurance to tech companies. If you think about the needs of your prospect, you’re bound to define companies that you can team up with to add value to a partnership and fast-track your way into a new pool of potential customers.
- Trust your experts. If you’re working with seasoned professionals who have experienced success in the past, let them do their best work for you. It will probably feel uncomfortable, because they have a different set of skills that you’ve likely never employed before. Demand accountability, but also work to collaborate with and understand those experts working on your behalf.
- Be patient. Marketing is a process, not an action. Coke didn’t run one campaign in 2003 and throw in the towel. They’ve been running ads since May 29, 1886. You are not building a shelter for today, but a castle for tomorrow.
Conclusion
Every business and economy is going to have ups and downs, but if you zoom out far enough, those ups and downs ultimately will look like a straight line.
It’s imperative to break the cycle of panic and calm. Don’t judge where you are today because today is the “victory lap” for the work you did previously. Focus on how the work that you start today will reward you in the distant future.
If this sounds like the road you want to be on, the road to market domination and security, and you find yourself wanting to work with the right marketing partners, reach out. 4B Marketing would love to be a paragraph (or even a chapter) in your amazing story.