All forms of marketing a company does belong to the entire company's marketing programme. This includes everything that is trying to, in one way or another, influence others to want to buy a company's products or services. Whether it's classic print advertising, Google, Instagram, Facebook ads or even a promotional coupon that you are giving away during a trade show, everything counts.

Short term wins gives short term effect

For a long time now, companies have had a strong focus on delivering short term profits, all to reach sales targets, according to a quarterly or annual budget. This is driven by all the new tools we marketers have in our toolbox revolving around "performance marketing". Put in $1 and get $5 back. I would like to call this the short term approach, the approach which gives us money in the bank today. That short-sighted approach is needed and is a valuable part of marketing.

At the same time, the question remains the same, how do I know that customers do not just come and buy from me because I'm running a promo offering discounts or other incentives to start buying from me?

Today, a customer usually has 2 - 4 different brands in their unconscious shopping list. If an item with a specific brand we are looking for is not available, we will instead go with our alternative number two and so on down the list. That is why it is so important to try to be in the consciousness of your customer group, so that your brand is going to be the preferred brand. We can easily see how many major leading brands are usually selected only when it comes to having guests over for dinner. Tomato ketchup from well recognized market-leading brand HEINZ is chosen more often for the bbq instead of e.g. some unknown brand.

Why balanced marketing is so important

If you represent a brand, you want to offer something that makes people come and buy from you continuously, even if you do not have a specific promo campaign running. A sales campaign can deliver increased sales for the moment but ends as soon as that specific campaign is over. Of course, this also has a small effect on sales volume in the long run, and this effect decreases much more slowly than short-term sales activation.

The balance for many different categories can usually be traced to 60% brand building and 40% sales activation. Then there are of course situations where this is not true, for example the financial industry where the advice is 80% brand building and 20% sales activation.

Short and long terms effects of marketing

In order to achieve a well balanced marketing programme, the long-term strategy needs to be also included. Here we need to think about how we will build the brand and create positive associations linked to the brand over time. Because that is exactly what is needed: time. It takes anywhere between 12-36 months to see an effect in many cases, varying depending on which category you sell within. You need to showcase the brand from its best side and grow with the key metrics we have all heard about. Awareness, Knowledge, Preference, Consideration, Choice, the list goes on.

What brand building achieves over time is an increase in the company's base sales - what we sell without having to market ourselves - and over time, the results of sales activation often double up. But what do we actually mean by that?

Well, what happens is that you get a multiplier on sales activations. According to the art of Performance Marketing, I have previously exemplified that an invested marketing dollar results in $5 in revenue. What happens when you have worked with a balanced marketing strategy between the variables brand and sales activation is that the effect that has been built up over a longer period of time now begins to give a multiplier, for example x2. For that reason the outcome now will be: for every $1 invested, there is a $10 return.

Is it worth it though? The long-term path increases cash flow in the future and constantly raises the company's base level of sales, while the sales activating campaigns do not need as much investment to generate better results.

The long-term strategy increases the cash flow of the future and constantly raises the company's base level, but is time consuming. The sales-activating campaigns are comparatively not as time-consuming to generate rewarding results in the much shorter term. The long-term strategy needs to be supplemented with the short-term and vice versa, together they will both be the most favorable. So working from the outside to achieve a balanced marketing programme is demonstrably a winning strategy for both B2B and B2C.

An additional effect of the long-term path is that it creates good incentives to be included in the prospective customers' consciousness 2 - 4 brand list. At the same time, we also build up our brand capital, which in some cases can be done from the inside out. To build a brand, the entire company needs to be involved and included. The set goals must be common because it is only then that the brand promise is really lived out and becomes the customer's overall experience of the entire brand.