There is a LOT of advice out there about advertising and marketing, and some of it will apply to you and some of it won’t. The only universal truth is this: you need to have a plan. That’s the only way to be able to go about marketing in a way that is smart, strategic, and driven by results. But a SmartInsights survey from 2025 found that 42% of businesses are doing digital marketing without having a defined strategy, which is a good way to potentially waste time and resources.
If you don’t currently have a digital marketing plan or you have one that’s not working very well, let’s take a look at a big-picture approach to getting started: short-term marketing tactics, long-term marketing tactics, and how to leverage both.
What Is Short-Term Marketing?
Short-term marketing is often more appealing because it is focused on delivering quick results on compressed timelines over a few days, a few weeks or a few months. It’s for driving customer action and achieving more immediate goals like:
- Launching a new product or service
- Boosting website or landing page traffic
- Increasing lead generation
- Testing new messaging or engagement strategies
- Improving lead conversion
- Adding new followers on social media accounts
Examples of Short-Term Marketing
There are a lot of different tactics you can incorporate as part of your short-term marketing plan.
Pay-per-click (PPC) and targeted paid ads
Paid advertising on Google or on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are a focused way to reach your ideal, targeted audience.
Sales, discount, and giveaway promotions
Contests, polls, giveaways, flash sales — everyone loves a great deal. Pushing out a limited-time offer is a great tactic for driving urgency and action.
Site optimization
Refreshing your website and landing pages to make it clear and easy for visitors to use can provide quick boosts for leads. Calls to action should be visible and straightforward.
Personalized email campaigns
Email marketing already has some of the highest return on investment. A well-designed, personalized automated email sequence can keep potential customers engaged and tip them into action.
Media and public relations
Collaborating with local news providers, contributing to industry blogs or publications, and pushing out official press releases can put you in front of new audiences.
What Is Long-Term Marketing?
If short-term marketing is more about driving demand and action, long-term marketing can be seen as more like brand building. It may not be as immediately gratifying as short-term tactics, but it can provide a lot of value when measured over the ensuing years. It’s geared toward delivering on goals like:
- Building your brand and reputation
- Boosting your search engine results page ranking
- Growing your social media platform
- Establishing industry authority and credibility
- Creating long-lasting customer loyalty and relationships
Examples of Long-Term Marketing
It’s kind of un-sexy work, the process of growing an email list. It takes time, working step by step to convince customers and potential customers to sign up, to stay subscribed, to stay
Brand voice
Authenticity is important to today’s consumers. They want to interact with companies that they feel like they know, so building your brand and establishing your brand voice is worth the time it takes.
Authority and reputation
Webinars, whitepapers, conferences and events, regular articles and insights — all of these go toward establishing your authority and demonstrating real thought leadership in your space and industry.
Customer relationships and testimonials
Personalized communication and connection contribute to the slow build and establishment of customer trust, which in turn can result in authentic testimonials.
Content marketing
Content is foundational to the user experience, and focusing on consistently creating and posting high-quality, relevant content demonstrates real value and reinforces customer trust.
SEO
Building your authority and regularly posting content can contribute to the long-term improvement of your search engine ranking, especially when paired with other SEO tactics like keyphrase research, as well as optimizing site structure and code.
How to Leverage Short-Term and Long-Term Marketing Strategies?
You obviously need a combination of both short-term and long-term tactics in order to make the most of your overall digital marketing plan. Putting all your effort into one or the other will not give you the sustainable results you need. Here are some steps you can take to try to ensure you’re effectively balancing both:
Know your company’s goals.
Sit down and map out what you want to achieve with your marketing, both immediate and long term. What metrics do you want to see five years from now? Ten years from now?
Know your customers.
All the marketing in the world doesn’t matter if it’s being shouted into a void. If you don’t already know where your customers hang out online and how they behave, pause and collect that data before moving forward.
Drill down on your available budget and resources.
The cost of putting on an event versus writing regular blog posts is very different. And your team might not have the knowledge or availability to do an event in the first place. Outline which tactics are accessible for you and the approximate costs of each so you can allocate accordingly.
Understand how short-term can support long-term.
Try to avoid siloing these two strategies into different areas. Short-term tactics can feed into your long-term efforts. For example: If you’re working toward being seen as a regional leader in your metro area, a short-term tactic like putting on a weekend educational event supports that.
Create a digital marketing plan.
Using your understanding of audience, budget, and resources, you can break down each business goal and outline which tactics — both short- and long-term — will be utilized. For example: You want to grow your list of engaged email subscribers, so you plan to use tactics like retargeting disengaged recipients, offering a new lead magnet, doing a social media giveaway. But you also invest in better, more quality content in your emails so current customers have a good reason to stay subscribed.
Partnerships Make It Possible
This hopefully gives you a good foundation to start building or honing a digital marketing plan for your own business or organization. But so many of our clients just don’t have the time to be worrying about things like this when they’d rather be delivering for their own clients and customers. If that sounds like you, you can always contact our marketing experts at EdwardsSchoen, and we’d be happy to work with you on a tactical strategy that meets your needs.
