What are the best strategies for balancing short-term and long-term growth in marketing?

Long term growth is primarily of 2 kinds - building a product category and need; and building a community around your brand specifically. Short term growth is just really about capturing existing demand for a solution and positioning your brand as a credible option. Notice that "brand" appears in both - brand building as a macro-initiative is important in both the short and long term. If there is already strong existing demand for your product category, short term growth takes precedence, with longer term category building efforts taking a back seat until there's no more growth to be efficiently extracted from the category as-is. If not, building awareness for your product category and the problem you solve takes precedence.

Marketing and sales are very different. I have always focused my efforts on sales I have spent money on short term marketing to push the Brands that I represent . Its imperative that you know your product and where to spend your money . You can also trade your product for marketing . We are on TV now with a commercial for our website that sells Hertz Dollar and Thrifty . We had our radio personality film and speak in the commercial we traded 2 free car rentals for this service. We were then approached by higher ups from the TV station . Who needed a large SUV with their camera crew they offered me 4 free commercials along with filming the rental experience and an endorsement about our company I consider that a win .

Before setting growth objectives, it’s important to confirm who you brand is, why you brand does what it does, who it serves and what problem it solves. Your mission and value statements. From there you have a better idea of what your long and short term growth goals could likely to be (numerically) based upon historic data, general industry and category benchmarks alongside specific competitive comparisons (if they apply). The short-term “low hanging fruit” will tend to be capturing the demand of those that are ready to buy, whereas the longer term growth goals can be weighted towards customer expansion (existing business) or customer acquisition (new business) depending upon market conditions, your budget and your brand power.

A common mistake that marketers make is to deploy demand capture strategies to prospects who are not ready to buy. It reflects poorly on their brands. Segment your audience (including using intent data) to identify whether they need education or they are looking for conversion. If they're early in their journey, you should be focused on delivering exceptional brand experiences through content and thought leadership in order to raise the "mental availability" of your brand when they are ready to purchase. And if they're "high intent" then by all means make it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand through demo requests, contact sales, and other such calls-to-action.

Your segmentation is at the intersection of many variables: - your product (does it serve many use cases, or one specific one) - your customer (one primary persona, or many) - the market (how big is your total addressable audience) Ideally, you’ll want to interrogate the data to find the largest opportunity segments. Once identified, you can position a marketing message, and an appropriate go-to-market (GTM) motion, that helps to articulate why your product meets a need better than any other. Whether you activate multiple segments or few, depends upon your market size, your product and your operational resources. The more segments > the more GTM motions > the more campaigns > the more content…

Marketers have a TON of ground to cover. I first recommend pin pointing your highest level goals possible. It tends to end like this: 1. Build a customer base 2. Build a fan base Now you can ensure that any and all of your activity goes toward creating one of the following goals. Finding the right mix for building customers may very well be different than where your fans & loyalists hang out. But the right channel mix begins and ends with who you’re looking to communicate with and why. To build the channel strategy you must first know your ideal audience backwards and forwards. Because before you start playing channel chess, you need to develop a clear, comprehensible message that speaks purposefully to that group.

Funnels work well in B2C. They are often over done and way to sales like. A good funnel provides the information a consumer needs, includes a VSL, and provides an opt-in for customers to get additional information.

Focusing on the wrong metrics will lead you to believe that the ROI on short-term marketing is higher, but in reality, it is just simpler to attribute. Finding the right alchemy of the two is the key to success. It is tempting to focus on harvesting demand using short-term marketing, but if the category is not large enough to support it, then you need a plan to grow the category and generate new demand. Demand generation takes time, money and expertise, if your growth is primarily contingent on short-term marketing and it tails off, your pipeline and entire business model could be impacted for many months.

Getting your basics in place is the biggest growth hack in marketing! There is a process for every marketing activity. Get to the roots of the process and growth is imminent!