Short-Term and Long-Term Marketing Strategies For Your Branding Agency - How To Strike The Perfect Balance For Massive Success
I know you know that setting up and running a successful 1-2 person branding agency isn’t just about delivering great work to your clients. You need to have a set of long-term and short-term marketing strategies up your sleeve, that you are using all the time in the right way, so you’re never short of clients.
Join me as I get under the hood of exactly what the difference is, why you should care, and how to use both kinds in your agency.
Short Term v Long-Term Marketing - what’s the difference?
Well, the clue’s kind of in the name!
Basically, when you look at all the things you could be doing to market your business, you can split them down the middle to those that bring in leads and sales quickly i.e. in a matter of days and weeks, and those that will take more time to develop i.e. weeks and months.
The trick is to know the difference.
Why?
Because if you haven’t objectively done that work, it’s all too easy to stumble down a rabbit hole of more blogs, podcasts, online courses that will give you a bunch of contradicting information, leaving you overwhelmed and possibly broke!
I’ll walk you through how you know which is a short-term strategy that you should invest time in now to get quick wins, and which is a long-term strategy that you should also invest time in now, but that will pay off in the long run.
The best Short-Term Marketing strategies for your agency
There’s 2 major areas to tap into for your short-term marketing:
1. Leveraging Existing Personal and Professional Networks:
Like they do say "It's not what you know; it's who you know".
And you know A LOT of people.
Seriously. If you think there’s no one you can talk to ask for referrals or new business, then just take a look at your phone.
Keep scrolling.
Keep scrolling.
Done yet?
Exactly.
If you need some inspiration, here’s a few categories all the people in your life fall into:
Family members.
Friends - people you like to hang out with, who you invite over for dinner (and you actually like having them over), your partner’s bowling buddies…you get it.
People you worked with - they could be in a former job where you were colleagues and employees together, they could be former clients who you really had a great time with and would love to do business with again, and even any kind of work experience, interning etc.
College and High School - your classmates, at the very least the ones you know, and maybe even the ones you only see at your 10 year reunion. It all counts - the simplest conversation starter could be ‘So, what have you been doing since college?’
Any networks or groups you’re part of - however formal or informal. You might be in a mastermind group, business networks, or even still be on a mailing list from a conference you went to last year. And yes, this extends to your online community - Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts etc.
2. Building New Relationships Through Targeted Outreach:
In other words, explore your ‘colder’ networks where you might not have any immediate connections, but if you’re super targeted in your approach, you can get really great results.
Before you do this, you need to take the time to figure out who your ideal market is. Yes, I know you’ve probably heard/read/seen this so many times, and you’re probably sick of hearing it again.
But this really is the key to making this approach work.
Even if you can’t get more narrow than how much your prospects generate in annual revenue, or where they’re located in the world, it sets you apart from every other branding agency out there, that talks about how beautiful their logo designs are.
Once you’ve picked a target, here’s how to approach them:
Find specific networking events or conferences where these people hang out. Hang out there too - get to know who the key influencers are, and what branding problems you can solve quickly.
Do some Googling and get a shortlist together of your top 50-100 prospects. Send a personalised email - you can have a simple template that you can reuse and adapt - and if you want to have the extra edge, record a short 1-2min video where you’ve done some top-line brand analysis on their website/marketing, and send it over.
Search which social media platforms your target audience is mostly hanging out on. Are they Instagrammers, or more LinkedIn types? Once you’ve sussed that, you can start your approach. You can even start to post a couple of articles/content that would be relevant. Remember, this is a short-term strategy, so don’t spend ages crafting the perfect IG caption…yet.
The best Long-Term Marketing strategies for your agency
You’ve got the short-term marketing down, and you should have plenty of ways you can reach out and promote your branding agency this way.
The good news about that is not only that short term strategies lead to momentum very quickly, they cost practically nothing, so it’s usually pure profit as soon as someone hires you that way.
Let’s take a deeper look at what you could do to build your authority and visibility in the long term.
The main focus is to educate your market on what you know, what you do, and how it gets results. Here’s some ideas to get you started:
Create a ‘Top 10’ or ‘Top 20’ list of common topics/questions/issues that your market talks about, and write a series of blog posts about them. You can take snippets of those and turn them into social media captions and short video content
A Day In The Life - create a ‘behind the scenes’ look at how you do a branding project from start to finish. You can do this as one piece of content, or split it up over several days/weeks
A daily reel/short on a topical issue in your market. A great way to do this is to set up some Google alerts for your industry, that relate to branding, and then each day, pick one thing that you want to give your opinion on, and shoot a quick 30s - 1min video and post it out.
Do a batch of videos and run them through a transcription software (like Otter.ai), edit a bit, and then turn those into articles
Research the Top 20 podcasts that your audience are likely to listen to, based on your research, and pitch them to appear as a guest. An effective strategy is to stay away from super popular ones at first, and go for the next tier down - especially if you are new to guest appearances. Check to see how engaged people are i.e. how frequently episodes come out, typically how many listeners, how many reviews/comments are left etc.
Attend your target market’s in-person events, online events, conferences and become a speaker at those events. The more you’re seen at these, the more you start to become ‘regular’ and familiarity can build authority. It may take going to a few events in a few different places before people start to refer business or opportunities to you, but hey, that’s why it’s a long-term strategy!
You could probably come up with a bunch more, but pick a few of these and start.
Remember, your first few attempts at these don’t have to be perfect - just start getting something out there, and improve and tweak as you go.
Bringing it all together - a master plan to be a marketing rockstar
By now, you should be feeling pretty confident that you have a bunch of stuff you can do for short-term and long-term marketing gains.
So the question is, how do you strike the right balance?
What do you need to do to make sure you’re not only hitting the right short-term strategies for your business, but also putting in the time to build up that authority long game?
Again, not rocket science, and SUPER simple.
You need a schedule.
That’s it.
Whether you use the calendar app on your phone or computer, or you like to keep things old school with a Dayplanner (remember those?) Bullet Journal or equivalent, it’s really up to you.
The main thing is, you guessed, do what works.
Next, you need to block out non-negotiable time that you will spend on your short-term activities, and then on your long-term strategy.
But Pia, I’ve got to get all this stuff done for my client. I can’t fit it in!
No pass. Your best work is NOT going to get you your next client, no matter how much you think it will. Spending MORE time over and above what you’ve been hired for may be a ‘warm and fuzzy’ for your client, but don’t ever confuse that with a marketing strategy.
Am I saying cut corners and do the bare minimum for your client? No!
Is a great current client likely to refer you to more clients? Yes!
It’s just that you have no direct control over that, in the way that you do over consistently reaching out to your network, doing targeted outreach, and building your authority, so I never add that as a marketing channel, or set any goals with that.
OK - back to your actual marketing.
If you still have space to take on more clients, or you’re not at the revenue goal you’ve set for yourself yet, then daily marketing is a must. And here’s how I suggest you map it out:
In any 5-day working week (no late nights and weekends - I actually want you to enjoy life outside of work), spend 2h each day on 1-2 short term-marketing activities. These could be reaching out to your friends and family, following up on emails/DMs with your network, having 1-1 meetings etc.
Once a week do an additional 1-2h on a long-term marketing strategy. If you’re creating online content, then you can use this time to batch up a few weeks’ worth of content. If you’re going to an event, then this could be a morning or an afternoon where you do that - and you could even do that every other week
Block out any vacation time, national holidays etc. If you’re doing this consistently, then you won’t lose any momentum by taking time out - trust me. And even if you think you should be ‘available’ during those times, your prospects might not be, so you might as well take a break!
Figure out how much revenue you want to be bringing in each month or quarter, from the different offers and services you have, and estimate your average conversion rates from connecting with prospective clients through each activity you’re doing. Long-term marketing can be harder to work out here, but certainly with your short-term activities, you can working out things like:
How many people do you need to reach out to before you book a meeting - either an initial sales meeting or a one-on-one with someone who can send you a referral?
How many of the referral meetings lead to an introduction to a potential client?
How many of the initial sales meetings lead to a sale?
Even if you have to guess some of these, use it as a baseline, and go from there. Then you can work backwards, and arrive at a figure for how many people you need to reach out to in order to hit your goals.
And that’s your master plan! You are welcome to complicate it further, just as you are welcome to work really hard and make no money. LOL
But seriously, consistency is key here. The most successful agencies didn’t get that way using the latest fancy AI or other super cool tech. They stayed consistent, and didn’t take their foot off the gas. That’s what it really takes to reach the success you’re after.
Here’s what you need to get…
There’s no silver bullet when it comes to marketing your branding agency. You probably know this, but if you’re not where you want to be with your revenue, I’d bet that some part of you is still hoping that’s the case.
So until that silver bullet is invented, short-term marketing is key to start ramping you up in the early stages of your agency, or if you’ve hit a ceiling in your revenue, and need a kickstart, and it needs to be balanced out with consistent long-term efforts to build your authority over time
Don’t rely all your efforts on short-term strategies - it’s not sustainable, and you’ll end up feeling like there’s no end in sight.
However you allocate your time between short- and long-term marketing strategies, consistency is key. Even if you don’t see results straight away, just keep on keepin’ on, and you’ll build up that momentum very quickly.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to fast-track your way to using the right short- and long-term marketing activities and all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!