The Lasting and the Short of It

We’re told this is the most important quarter in the company’s history. Again. And because the pipeline is thin, the answer must be speed, hacks, and activity now to feed a hungry commercial team.

A lot of the discussion about B2B marketing today is about the drive for short-term results, turning marketers into growth hackers who trade trust for tactics that depend on a numbers game of a 3% response rate, never mind the 97% we piss off.

And yet, people open emails from brands they trust, engage with thought leadership on social media from people and brands with established authority, and when choosing from a page of paid search results, they’ll click the most credible link.

Trust, authority, and credibility are not generated in the moment.

As marketers, we understand that success today is accepting the gift of yesterday.

We have the classic work of Binet and Field, The Long and Short of It, to guide us here. Longer-term investments in brand awareness that we made over the last 12 months will provide a performance multiplier for any campaign activity we run today.

Of course, this doesn’t show up in HubSpot, Salesforce, or whatever dashboard the commercial team is looking at this week.

So, I’ve heard a lot about marketers shying away from using the word “brand” to describe the “long of it” of awareness campaigns.

But maybe it’s not the word “brand” that’s the problem, it’s the word “long”.

Who has time for long?

Maybe the better way to frame this is “lasting”.

The perception with “long term” is that there is no benefit today from running a brand campaign, which, of course, is rubbish.

Awareness campaigns that build trust, authority, and credibility do have an impact in the short term, but that investment has a lasting effect.

Mind you, so do short-term tactics. I wonder about having an AI SDR carpet-bomb your ideal customer for a 1% response rate, leaving a lasting scar in the other 99%'s minds about your brand.

Yes, we need to work in this quarter, deliver short-term results, but like putting part of your income into savings, create a lasting gift for our future campaigns, that will compound over time.

It’s a small thing, but, and in deference to Binet and Field, I wonder if we need to think about “the lasting and the short of it”.