The long and the short of it:
Making short-term results from long-term investments

We’re in conversations every day with clients where the pressure is on to deliver ROI, particularly in the form of a desired number of leads. But there’s also a lot of focus on delivering more meaningful, genuine marketing. We’re now at a point where it’s almost going too far, with the need to prove ROI dominating the need to get started and experiment. 

Our ideal is to bring the two together, but they don’t often align with audience need. The customer in need of education and insight isn’t the same as the one ready to purchase… Right audience, right message, right time has never been so important. Seems simple right?  

So many businesses see marketing as a means to drive leads, to push into the buying cycle. How do you demonstrate the value of a longer-term strategy and show that marketing is an investment, not a cost?  

More than just a lead gen engine  

B2B marketing efforts should be more than just generating leads. It’s a growth driver for your business. In conversations with a client recently, they noted a 12-month deal which demonstrated 136 marketing touchpoints. Buyer journeys are inevitably becoming more complex and we can’t ignore that as marketers. We need to think further ahead and consider how long the buyer journey realistically takes.

Our objective at Revere is to drive stronger purpose, higher value and greater impact, but to do this we need to think of both the short-term and long-term approach. This means shifting to long-term mindsets and nimble ways of working. 

Typically, budgets are made available for short-term initiatives that deliver quick wins from an ROI perspective back to the business, versus long-term growth as well as scepticism around the ability of brand marketing to drive growth. 

Us marketers get it. Brand building has a positive impact on demand-generation activities. The more awareness there is around a brand, the more successful any short-term activities will be. Interestingly, a recent stat from LinkedIn suggests that marketers continuing to report on short-term metrics are hindering the ability to convince the business of long-term impacts and gains.  

Do we need to shift the way we report? What do you think?  

As a nano step, make the move away from vanity metrics – MQLs are a made-up construct that neither equate to buyer value nor marketing’s value to the business. That means focusing on annual outcomes and propensity to buy.  

We do know we have to be realistic. Yes, it’s ideal to use long-term strategy to build brand awareness, but we also know there’s a need for quick turnaround, tactical activities to meet immediate pressures. 

Achieving balance  

It’s about taking the right people along with us on the journey – using the right stakeholders at the right time to understand the value in the long-term strategy.  

For some, short-term metrics are used as a means of understanding - simplifying the impact and value of marketing . But it's not as simple as 'spend money, obtain results to quantify', marketing runs much deeper. So, it’s our job as marketers to open the eyes of all stakeholders to the bigger picture and develop understanding to build share of mind to influence future buying decisions. And that’s done through brand awareness.  

It also means that marketing designed to drive conversion won’t resonate – particularly to the wide proportion of the audience that’s out-of-market; those who won’t buy today but are likely to transact in the future. 

Thankfully, today’s martech allows us to glean more from long-term activity than before. Brand trackers allow us to review creative impact; reach and exposure all support in measuring quality of attention; search volume and impressions are just some of the metrics which allow you to measure the quality of your awareness. 

We don’t bin short-term metrics all together, but it’s vital to be aware that they aren’t the sole focus. They should be considered as part of your wider analysis and, in turn, the marketing budget should be looked at in the same way.  

A decent proportion of your marketing budget should be allocated to longer-term, brand-pull activities in addition to those short-term push tactics. There needs to be understanding that these efforts are an investment for the long term. The steps along the way are indeed small, but we mustn’t get distracted from the eventual destination. 

Let’s also not forget the 20% budget allocation for experimentation and pilot… after all, as the buyer journey evolves, the best way to learn is through trying and failing fast.