As a full-service digital marketing agency, clients come to us asking for a quick-fix to their business problems. They would come with a big, comprehensive list of marketing tactics that they wish to be a part of, hoping that we would take that list and recommend a magic formula or strategy that will solve their problem, using all of them.
Sound familiar?
What many brands fail to realize is that being involved in multiple marketing tactics does not guarantee growth in the short term (unless you have a ridiculously large budget, in which case this article may not apply to you).
In fact, the opposite often happens.
Brands that seek high growth in the short-term try to involve as many marketing tactics as they can. The common philosophy is that, by investing the budget on many marketing tactics, you are approaching your business problems from several angles, resulting in better synergy and ultimately, results.
However, this also means that they are spreading their resources thin, resulting in a lack of budget, time, and effort spent on optimizing these marketing tactics fast enough to realize the short-term growth.
As marketers, we will forever be limited by finite resources.
Whether your limited resources come in the form of time or budget, a good marketer knows how to properly prioritize and phase their marketing budget, ensuring that the right resources go to the right marketing tactics at the right time.
Putting More Focus on Short-Term, Results-Driven, Direct Digital Marketing
There are some tactics that lead to faster responses when it comes to results measurement and analysis, allowing marketers to quickly optimize them. However, some require months or years of optimization before you can see any results.
Tactics like SEO, content marketing, or inbound marketing may take several months or even years before you begin to see positive ROI.
If your brand needs rapid growth in your business, it is a good idea to divest from these tactics in the short term and re-invest them in quick-to-optimize, direct-response media, such as PPC, display advertising, or social media advertising, to generate quick but high-quality leads or sales.
How Direct Digital Marketing Can Lead to Rapid Growth
With direct response digital marketing, you can instantly track your audience’s behavior as they move through your conversion funnel, from impressions to the ultimate conversion.
This instant measurement and reporting means that you can quickly see what is working and what it not and adjust your campaign accordingly.
For instance, PPC advertising, depending on the budget and the scale of the campaign, a campaign can be optimized to return a positive CPA (Cost per Acquisition) as quick as 1-3 months after the initial launch by constantly analyzing and adjusting keywords, keyword bids, advertisements, and landing pages.
For social media advertising, a marketer can run 1-week multi-variate tests to determine the optimal audience, messaging, bid, and placement to acquire leads or sales in the most profitable manner.
Making a Smooth Transition to Long-Term Marketing Sustainability
Not only are these tactics quick to optimize, they can also be very sustainable (given constant monitoring) and provide valuable insights for your longer-term and more complex marketing tactics.
The online buying behavior of your customers normally remains quite consistent. We rarely see huge dips or jumps in the CPA of our PPC or social media campaigns once they have been optimized. Given that, after optimization, it just takes monitoring and making minor tweaks to maintain and slowly improve the campaigns.
Second, the process of optimizing the PPC or social media campaigns takes a significant amount of testing of different success factors, including audiences, messaging, creative, placement, and even understanding their intent.
When these direct-response digital marketing tactics have been optimized, marketers will walk away with tons of data and access to valuable insights to guide them as they expand their marketing. A great example of this is taking high-performing search queries from your PPC campaigns and applying them to fuel your long-term SEO strategy.
Your Back-Up Plan
Optimizing your long-term marketing tactics, like SEO, can take a significant amount of time and budget. Not only that, odds are that several months or years may pass before you are able to optimize these tactics to where they are profitable for your business.
According to Hubspot, most companies begin to see increases in their number of lead or sales after 7-12 months of inbound marketing efforts. For SEO, most agencies require at least 3-6 months (depending on budget) before noticeable results can be seen in sales from organic traffic.
As you are spending your marketing budget on these long-term tactics, your optimized PPC and digital advertising campaigns can still continue to bring in valuable leads and sales.
In other words, the digital direct-response advertising can act as your brand’s back-up plan as you venture into the often-daunting, long-term marketing strategy.
Are You Prioritizing and Phasing Your Budget Properly?
As much as we would like to jump in and get involved in a complex, multi-level marketing strategy, many high-growth brands may not have the required resources to effectively execute an overly complex one.
A smart marketer will take a look at his/her budget and begin the budget allocation process by first having a deep understanding of how each of the digital marketing tactics work, and using those insights to effectively prioritize and phase their marketing spend to ensure high growth in the short-term and long-term sustainable growth.
If your brand is struggling with prioritizing and phasing your marketing spend in the short-term and long-term, we are happy to help.