Win With an Investment - Long-Term Marketing
It would be nice if there were a marketing strategy you could implement today that would catapult your brand to success tomorrow, but that’s rarely how life and business work. You might be able to attract the attention of your target market in a few seconds, but building (and maintaining) trust takes a lot longer.
To set yourself up for success, you must commit to a marketing strategy for at least six months before you start beating yourself or your team up for not achieving the metrics you hoped for. Sometimes it can take a year or more. They accepted that you are in this for the long haul yet. Perfect — now let us get into the top three long-term marketing strategies.
social proof
The importance of social proof is nothing new — back in the days of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle theorized that there were three modes of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos. While he developed the theory to make grand speeches, we can apply all three methods to modern-day marketing just as quickly. Tapping into your audience’s emotions (pathos) and satisfying their logical thought process (logos) are still relevant, and so is ethos, which is all about social proof and credibility. Humans evolved to be social creatures — we like to follow the crowd. If countless other people are wearing a particular clothing brand, it will at least pique our interest in the label. This effect is even more substantial if we see people we respect and admire promoting something.
If your business is brand new, it is understood that you cannot generate social proof overnight. It takes time to secure big-name clients and develop a suitable number of reviews. Still, once you start to generate some results, your efforts will snowball — the more pieces of social proof you have, the more customers you will get, resulting in even more parts of social evidence, and so on. There is no time like the present to start building momentum.
Social Proof Solutions:
Customer testimonials
Ratings on review sites
Brand partnerships
UGC content marketing
PR media exposure
Influencer marketing
Social Media Marketing
A few sub-strategies fall under the social media marketing category, and some are more long-term than others. For instance, paying for influencer marketing or social media paid aids can help you to build traction more quickly. If you want to build up your brand’s social media page from scratch, you will need a lot of patience.
So, stop checking your follower count daily and focus on creating high-quality content as consistently as possible. We are discussing three to five weekly posts with engaging or informative content.
We recommend focusing on one social media (the one your target audience uses most) to avoid spreading yourself too thin. Feel free to branch out once you have developed an audience in one place. Funnily enough, having an excellent social media presence is another social proof aspect. See how it all links together.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the perfect example of how achieving results is a lengthy process. Many companies new to SEO assume that if they publish a good enough blog post or use a few keywords on their website homepage, they will be guaranteed to rank well. Google (and other major search engines) will not give their top spot away from that easily. Other than the quality and SEO-friendliness of your actual blog posts, search engines consider a range of factors, such as:
Backlinks
Quality content
Technical factors (Site speed, response, etc.)
Website accessibility structure
Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.
It might be a cliché, but marketing is a long-distance event. So, do not be disheartened if you do not achieve instant results. If you feel overwhelmed by the work these long-term strategies involve, we have good news — you don’t have to figure it all out alone.
