What is Long Term Marketing?
Early we wrote a blog that was focused on top of mind awareness. That type of marketing is important for virtually all types of businesses and includes marketing activities like direct mail, email, social media, radio, TV, print, billboards and the like. These types of marketing activities have a “short-term” effect in bringing your business “top of mind” but the impact is short term because of the quantity of marketing messages we see in a day. Various experts and studies state we are exposed to anywhere between 247 and 3,000 advertising messages daily, that is 90,155 to 1,000,000 messages a year!
There is a ton of marketing “noise” out there and yes, to be successful, you need to participate. The good news for small and medium size businesses is that you can be much more targeted (at least you should be) than the giant companies. This means you won’t need to spend nearly as much money or time as they do on top of mind awareness marketing.
But what is long-term marketing? Top of mind awareness marketing is seen and then “disappears”. You can’t replay a radio ad, once the newspaper or postcard is read it is thrown away…therefore out of sight and out of mind. A long-term marketing activity has a longer “shelf life”. It is something that can be around for sometimes as short as days, but typically weeks, months or even years at a time.
In my opinion there is huge value in having long term marketing items in your mix, in fact, I believe that it makes your top of mind awareness marketing more effective. Say you have a calendar on your wall with your insurance agent’s name on it. I am certain that after a while you stop consciously seeing the name or logo of that agent, but your brain doesn’t stop “seeing” it! So now, when that same insurance agent sends you a postcard, letter, email or posts something on social media, while you may be quickly sorting through those items, when your brain “sees” that logo or name again, it connects back to the calendar it has been “seeing” and perhaps that causes you to pause a moment or stop to pay more attention to that item.
What are long term marketing campaigns? There are thousands of options for type of marketing items that can be used- include promotional marketing products (over 900,000 different items, part of an $18 billion dollar sector of the advertising/marketing industry) as well as print items (calendars, notepads), gifts, wearables and more. Like your top of mind awareness marketing you should have a plan and consistent approach to implement this aspect of your marketing program.
There is not one single marketing activity that you can use and then check off the “I did my marketing” box. But having a mix of top of mind awareness and long term marketing items together can produce better results than just engaging in one type of marketing activity or the other.
Sources:
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1997/05/05/smallb2.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/guide.ch1.html
http://dl.tamu.edu/Projects/AndersonRetailing/vol4/92Vol4No6P2.htm
http://www.superprofile.com/problems.html
http://www.naa.org/display/retailheadlines/v1no4/pg6.html
http://www.judydiamond.com/gold12-00.html
http://www.ohsu.edu/son-empwellness/aug2000/data-smog.htm
http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/jul/harper.html
http://students.washington.edu/tmutal/cmu498/cmu498.html
