Marketing has become more complicated than ever
and even though there are literally hundreds of channels
and tactics to reach the desired audience,
companies continue to focus the majority of their energy
on short-term tactics such as advertising.
"You should look into advertising."
According to a study by the IPA and ISBA
in Marketing Week last year,
"75% of marketers and 73% of agencies
agree that short-term tactical need often take priority
over longer-term objectives."
Now, I've been banging on the drum
for long-term strategic thinking for a while now,
but today, I wanna give a bit of a primmer on what I mean
by short-term and long-term marketing
and why this balance is important because even as
marketing as grown more complex,
many people still seem to conflict advertising
with marketing and tactics with strategy.
"Is there a difference?"
Wrong.
My name is Tara and this is Truly Strategic.
[Django's Café on Melody Loops]
Even though the data gathered in the report
is a little outta date and a bit problematic
in that it merely examines these enormous case studies,
Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of it,
originally published in 2013,
comes to a fascinating conclusion.
"Marketers should invest 60% of their budgets in
long-term brand building and 40% in short-term
sales activation to achieve the best return
on marketing investment, or ROMI."
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, this is not what's happening.
The majority of companies continue to focus
on short-term tactics, often jumping on
trend bandwagons such as Facebook ads and programmatic.
"We gotta make a viral video."
First time we've seen companies switch their
entire marketing plan overnight because of these trends,
often as they've barely implemented their last shiny object.
One company changed its tactics four times
as we were putting together a proposal.
"We want content."
"Oh no, no, we want community engagement."
"Wait, wait, wait, stop the presses.
"Our new focus is influencer marketing."
The last straw was their switch to marketing automation.
"That's it, I'm done."
All of these are perfectly fine tactics
if used as part of an over all strategy,
but they're not silver bullets
and by leading with the tactics, they're setting themselves
up for absolute failure.
As the famous quote by Sun Tzu in The Art of War goes,
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
But also, tactics without strategy
is the noise before defeat."
"Defeated."
Once you add in propensity toward short-termism
defined by economists as, "an excessive focus on
short-term results at the expense of long-term interests,"
we end up with a completely broken cycle
destined to repeat itself.
"You are just gonna continue to do the same thing
over and over and over again."
And worse, according to studies by McKinsey,
this cycle has been on the rise since 1999.
I don't think that there's any coincidence
that this was also the time when more and more advertisers
were shifting to the web.
Binet and Fields themselves warned of the pull
of big data.
So here we are.
We have hundreds of channels and tactics available
to reach our market with our messages.
It's cheaper than ever to buy an impression
because there is so much inventory online and even off.
Therefore, it gets even more accessible so more businesses
can jump in and advertise.
Facebook alone has over six million businesses
buying ads regularly.
So, more complexity, more competition,
and more uncertainly, but a decline in strategic
long-term thinking?
Call me crazy but that seems like a recipe for disaster!
"We're all gonna die!"
The key here is to strike the right balance,
to help you meet your goals.
The definition of marketing as approved by the
American Marketing Association is,
"The activity, set of institutions,
and processes for creating, communicating, delivering,
and exchanging offering that have value for customers,
clients, partners, and society at large."
Not programmatic advertising or increasing impressions.
We define our role as strategists to connect companies
with their customers through understanding the market,
helping develop the products that serve that market
and finding the right channels to distribute
the products and messages to that market.
The right audience, the right message, the right channels
at the right time.
"Right, right.
Right, right, OK!"
There are hundreds of channels and hundreds of millions
of potential people at the receiving end.
The key to strategy, short-term and long term,
it to find the right path through
in a way that is sufficient, sustainable,
and most likely to be successful.
"That's just it.
That's the key."
In my next video, I'm gonna talk about what long-term
and short-term tactics look like and how to use
strategy to find that best path forward.
So, subscribe or follow where you're watching this
if you wanna find out when I publish.
My name is Tara and this has been Truly Strategic.
[Django's Café from Melodyloops.]