Short term vs long term marketing tactics

In preparation for our upcoming masterclass on 19 November,  Raluca Apostol, our demand gen expert and Richard Parsons, True's founder, debated over which of the 2 is better:

• short term marketing, with its immediate results or
• long term marketing, with its sustainable growth?

Check out the arguments they made in the video debate. Plus, join the event to be a part of the debate and discover:

• the 5 guiding principles of growth
• how do you demonstrate the connection between marketing and business goals
• how marketing can impact true growth.

Read the transcript of the debate:

There is an undeniable tension between short-term and long-term. And we're here to talk about that, debate it, and I'm going to tell you why short-term is just better. So let's get ready for a fight.

I think to begin with, short-term is quick to deploy and adapt. It's not will they, won't they. You set up something, you see quickly if it works or not. If it doesn't, you can always redo it and try again. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

We live in the age of speed. Statistics say that in-person events, around 52%, and webinars, around 51%, are the most effective B2B marketing channels. Do you think it takes years and years to plan these and put them together? No. Just a few months and bam, you have a winning strategy already. Plus, even though the event will be over at some point, you can always think of the next one and you always have something new to communicate and be relevant to people.

Then there's the direct and easy way to measure impact. Imagine going to your manager with a strategy to have them approve it, and you will tell them that they will see the results in one year. And it's a bit hard to track the results. Nobody has time for that.

You know how it is. They want results now or maybe yesterday, and they want to know exactly how to track it. And while time machines have not been invented, that we know of, maybe they are ⁓ there's no need to wait. You can show them results right now, in a week or a month, immediately.

Think of a paid ad campaign. You set it up and then it shows impressions, clicks, leads within days. Can a brand campaign do that? I don't think so. The long-term side might argue that the sales cycle is long in B2B and it takes time to build that relationship. But when you focus on delivering leads, the goal is to generate them. 

Converting might be a different strategy that you focus separate resources on, but in order to have a relationship to build, you need to know that person, so you need to generate the lead. And by doing that fast, you can get the trust and buy-in of your manager. Well, you put together a strategy, it delivers results, they trust you to put together another strategy, another tactic, and they deliver results, and it's an infinite loop of trust. And finally, budget and ROI.

With short term, you don't spend money with no guarantee that it turns into something later down the line or that it doesn't turn into anything and you've wasted a lot of time and money to get to that point. I mean, long term is cool and fancy as long as you can make it to the next quarter. With short term, you act now, you see results now and not later. You see immediate conversions. You see the clients pouring in and those new contracts will then ⁓ fuel the new campaigns, new tactics that you're going to put together.

I mean, sure, you're not reaching those who are not in the market to buy, but there's time to focus on them later. You can reach them when they are ready to buy and then you will be there with a campaign to trigger that. Say you want to offer a limited time gift or a special discount. There is a clear deadline on when that will be evaluated, if it worked or not, and if people will convert.

I was looking at stats in 2023, 36 % of B2B marketing budgets went to lead generation. So short-term, it's really where the money is. This was the largest chunk of it. Of course, there's 64 % somewhere, but you can think about that later.

Over to the long-term side.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting me to this debate. I'm here to propose that brand building is not only more important than demand generation, but it is in fact the true hero in the B2B world. And yet somehow it has been forced to stand in the shadow of demand gen, the lazy self-serving goal hanger of marketing strategy. Enough is enough. It's time to set the record straight once and for

Demand loves hogging the limelight while brand building does all the heavy lifting in the sale. Let's talk about the 90 % rule, shall we? Here's the cold hard truth. When someone moves from out of market to in market, the first search engine they use is their brain. They ask, who can help me solve this problem? And neuroscience has proved that they typically think of up to three brands, not four, five or six, just three. And if you fast forward to the bottom of the funnel, who do they buy from?

They buy from one of those three brands that immediately came to mind on day one. You can send all the emails, run all the PPC ads and spam all the LinkedIn feeds you like and perhaps some of those webinar and events that you were referring to and power it with amazing intent data to be timely. But if you're not in the top three, you're fighting it out amongst the long list of vendors that get removed as the DMU strives, as the DMU sifts through the purchase decision. So they kind of remove those vendors as they go.

And why do those brands win the sale in 90 % of cases? Trust, familiarity, risk aversion. Buyers don't want to gamble their budgets, their reputations and their careers on whothehellisthat.com. They want a brand that they've heard of, a brand they can remember. That's what brand building delivers. It's the strategy that gets your buyers heads, gets it into your buyers heads long before they even realized they need you. Demand Gen, meanwhile, shows up like that striker I mentioned earlier. It gets the ball over the line, but without brand building, there would be no ball.

Still not convinced? Let's turn to the evidence. Empirical studies show that campaigns that focus on awareness and fame outperform sales activation campaigns by 214%. And when I say outperform, I mean on very large business effects like revenue growth, market share gains, profit, decreased price sensitivity. Why? Because brand campaigns build mental availability.

They create sticky memories. If you focus only on demand gen, you're fighting it out for a measly 10 % of a chance of winning that sale with all those other vendors that are in the long list. Brand building isn't just about sales though, it's about power. A strong brand attracts talent, it keeps employees loyal and inspired, and it gives you the upper hand with investors, partners, and even pricing, yes, even pricing. 

A great brand that lets you charge more for the same product because people believe in it. Pricing is the biggest driver of profitability. DemandGen doesn't increase pricing power at all. It discounts itself often into oblivion, two-for-one offers, things like that. It reduces often profitability. Brand building is strategy. DemandGen is tactics.

Brand building is a long-term investment in growth and market dominance. DemandGen is the short-term fix. Brand building wins hearts and minds. DemandGen wins, well, very little. So which do you think really matters? It's time to give DemandGen a gentle pat on the head where it deserves and say, well done, but sit down. Brand building is the real champion of B2B marketing. Thank you.

Well, thank you for your arguments. But I think one of the things that we talk about when talking about, when talking about brand building is budgets. And we know that brand building can be expensive. Whereas demand is less though it has lower budgets and more of an immediate return. So how do you want to go about that?

I would say is that brand building is only expensive because it requires reach. If you want to go for a broad audience, then brand building is...because typically in B2B, you've got long purchase cycles, let's say over a five-year cycle, 100 % of people are gonna buy in a five-year cycle, maybe 20 % are buying in one year cycle, which means only 5 % are buying in a three-month cycle.

So if you're trawling the market constantly for people with an immediate need, only 5 % of people are in the market, there's going to be 95 % wastage on your budget. That is wastage and that's not great use of your thing. And if you're offering two for one offers, then that isn't going to be necessarily kind of building those memory metrics. So that is wasted money. Brand building on the other hand, you can build brand to one person. I'm not adverse to brand building into one organization, an ABM campaign, build brand into that organization.

The challenge that you have with that though, when you do narrow and go for a niche audience, is that you end up over a seven year cycle. Typically for a mid-sized organization, mid-sized DMU, a decision-making unit, actually, the whole of the thing, the whole buying unit switches out on a seven year cycle.

You've always got people retiring, new people coming in. You've got people moving from one sector to another sector. So there's always this churn of people that are in the DMU. It's not static. So brand building does require, because we're always trying to get that sale in that year four, year five, whatever it might be. Obviously we want to get immediate sales as well. It means that you do need to be constantly investing in brand building because there's always this churn. So that's where the expense comes into it because you've got to have not too narrow targeting a quite broad reach.

Reach is another big indicator in the evidence. It's a significant way of growing your brand. So you do want to be kind of having that reach metric. Whereas if you are going for the short term, you haven't got to deal with that churn issue. And that does mean that maybe you can be narrow targeted and you can focus on people with intent data and people who are in market. So you're always trying to remove as much wastage with that intent data.

So I get it and I agree that the brand building does require bigger budgets. And typically it requires bigger budgets because from a production point of view, you want something that's got standout and that doesn't always require bigger budgets, but nearly always does. It's a quicker win to invest in kind of high gravity, creative, big production video, et cetera, because you're more likely to get those memory metrics.

Of course, if you're trawling the market for an immediate need, then you don't need to have that kind of level of investment. You can just be timely and relevant and have something that is going to resonate with that person at that precise moment. So yeah, so I would agree with your premise that brand building does require a little bit more money, but it doesn't need to be that big if you sort of start to find ways of narrowing it down.

So in your argument, you were talking about email marketing and events, but let's be honest, brand building also uses those tactics. So the tactics in itself has nothing wrong with it. You're just, you just want to use them how you want to use them. Long-term side.

Yeah, I would dispute that. I actually don't think that brand building is built with emails. Think emails, the B2C world knew for a very, very long time that emails were good for building loyalty. When someone already has a relationship with an organization, your bank, a utilities company, and they send you something and it's kind of quite functional.

Then I think email can work very well there and obviously that's an opportunity to impart some communication. But to try and build brand using email or to use it with webinars is not so much the channel that is actually the big deal here. It's that those vehicles and those channels tend not to be very emotional channels. And what I mean by that is you're trying to get an emotional response from the audience.

So we know that campaigns that try to build fame, and fame over short-term sales activation are three times more effective at driving business results. So that's those very large business results that I talked about earlier. So really you do want to have channels and platforms and formats that enable you to tell an emotive story to get the emotional response from the audience.

It's really, really, really difficult in email. It's pretty difficult in webinars because they tend to be quite factual and...uh, rationally, no, rationally argument driven, but film YouTube is increasingly important. I don't know about you, but I watch YouTube on my, you know, my big TV in my lounge. Um, uh, I think that there's so many ways of communicating with our audience that are bigger canvases, bigger platforms.

I think that the internet, for B2B, the internet killed off, um, our main route to market going back all those, that time ago to 20, 25 years ago when, um, we used to have the double page spread and that was a big canvas to tell our brand story. When the internet killed that off, we were then diminished quite a lot. And in the first instances of the internet, you know, we had little thumbnail size graphics, static graphics, and that was where we started. And you can see that it went from above the line thinking very quickly because there wasn't the channels for us. It went very, very quickly to below the line thinking.

The B2C brands never had that problem because the internet didn't kill off TV, didn't kill off out of home. It didn't kill off radio. It didn't kill off press in terms of like national newspapers. Actually B2C world kept its above the line channels. B2B lost it. But now we're in the gold, I would argue we're in the golden era of B2B because we, for the first time, we've got these channels like Connected TV, YouTube.

Formats online, even digital formats, are much more interactive, much more kind of animated. So we've got that the canvas has grown. And I think that that gives us opportunities.

And then, of course, with the era of AI, I think that for those mid-size organizations who are saying, well, I can't afford to do the production for a TV commercial, maybe AI starts to open that up and says, well, actually, maybe you can. I think AI is going to be another great democratizer, a leveler. That allows smaller businesses to invest in high production value that is worthy of being on a bigger screen or a bigger canvas that historically might have been out of their reach.

So it kind of seems like we feel like we're both right?

Of course, I was talking the football metaphor earlier and you wouldn't want to be on the pitch with everybody in defence and everybody in midfield and no strikers. You know, if you're going to score that goal, you need the entire team, you need the thing to be joined up from beginning to end. So that's the utopia, that's the ideal to be able to invest in both sides.

But what I would say is that if you don't get started now in doing some brand building, then that's going to be a problem. I actually challenged myself recently to think, can I think, based in London, can I think of any Romanian brands? And the only brand that I could really think of was Dacia. That was the only one that really came to mind. So it's interesting. I think maybe Romania has got some catching up in the global world of building brands.

But you know, the way that you get started, even if you're a small or a mid-size organization, you get started in your own domestic market and you build from there the few people you need to talk to today. Learn how you do that. Build the brand with those people. And that will of course help you then go to international markets and eventually have global dominance.

it's interesting that you mentioned that because in the upcoming masterclass, long-term versus short-term, where to focus on business growth, you're gonna talk about the five principles of growth. And we're gonna talk about how do you split between short-term and long-term to ensure that you get results both in the next quarter, but also on the long run and potentially even help you go international. And you're flying to Bucharest to host that on 19 November.

I am, yeah, and I'm really, really looking forward to it. So thank you very much, firstly, for inviting me. So that's great. And yeah, and I will be revealing other things today. I've talked about some empirical evidence, but I will be talking about what is the optimal split between brand and sales activation, how you should split your budgets, what the empirical evidence suggests. We'll be talking about perhaps some different vertical markets, how a product company might be different from a SaaS company.

But yeah, we'll be talking about some of that split there, but we'll be bringing the five principles of growth. So there'll be not just about the debate between brand and lead generation, but some of those other things that you need to be considering to be a global brand.

So I'm guessing if anyone wasn't convinced to any side after our talk, they should definitely attend it and see what they think after the conversation, the masterclass.

I would love people to come to the day and debate with me live. That would be brilliant. We're definitely going to open up to the floor. So I would love to hear people's opinions.

Good, that's it, we'll do that.