Marketing moves fast. From outside the industry, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s just a bunch of trends and fads, one after the other. Nothing has contributed to that misunderstanding more than the latest artificial intelligence craze, sold to you as if marketing is now as simple as pressing a button.

Of course, those who’ve been around for a while know better.

With more than a decade of experience, New York Ave has been around long enough to see trends come and go. While technology is changing how marketing is delivered, strategy is still the most important aspect – and that can only come from humans. Likewise, each marketing deliverable must be crafted with the human touch.

Your customers and future customers already have a term for uninspired, AI-driven marketing: Slop.

Your brand deserves better. But how do you get there? It can be tough to look at something like marketing and see the long sweep of history behind it. As a result, too many small and mid-sized businesses get bogged down reinventing the wheel instead of benefiting from experience. To make things easier, we’ve created this post.

Why Your Local Marketing Agency Suggests Long-Term Perspective

After hundreds of clients across dozens of industries, we’ve come to recognize the common concerns that can pull even seasoned leaders off course when they feel behind or stuck. If you feel like you’re not “there yet,” it can be frustrating to hear that before you can speed up, you might just have to slow down.

Marketing has a learning curve measured in years, not weeks or months. Strategic hindsight may be 20/20, but you can improve your results by focusing on proven best practices. When it comes to marketing maturity and long-term growth, here are our brand lessons – the things so many businesses learn the hard way.

These four concepts help define us as a marketing agency:

1. Consistency Is King

It can take 5-7 encounters before a prospective customer will remember your brand exists, 8-11 before they’re clear on what you do, and more than 12 before they’re ready to seriously investigate working with you. Every time your marketing loses focus by moving on to the next thing, you may as well be starting over.

With that in mind, any marketing strategy needs to be locked in on the basics. Who are your ideal customers? Where do you find them? What are their problems? And how do they prefer to be addressed? Once you are clear on these details, targeted text and video content can lay the foundation for a relationship.

Time is your most valuable resource, and conserving it is crucial. That’s true on two levels:

• On the micro level: As a senior leader, you shouldn’t need to worry about marketing tasks.
• On the macro level: Once your strategy is in place, it’s essential to keep it moving forward.

New ideas, tools, or technologies should never divert your energy. Either they enhance what you’re already doing, or they can wait until the next campaign, which brings us around to the next strategic marketing idea.

2. Patience Is Strategic

Small businesses often come to marketing with a sense of impatience. That’s sometimes true even when they make the smart move and come to a full-service marketing agency. On the other hand, experienced business leaders know they can reap the greatest rewards by treating marketing as an investment.

This is especially noticeable when there’s an economic downturn. In the search for easy savings, marketing is often the first thing on the chopping block. The problem? Without marketing, they’re passing up what’s often their only chance to meet the people who will become new customers weeks or months down the line.

When the economy bounces back, businesses that pulled out of their marketing investments quickly find they have lost ground to those who were steady in their investment. That can lead to them closing their doors even after they’ve weathered the storm. Marketing starts slow, but it offers compounding returns over time.

3. Content Leaves Legacy

Even the simplest blog post leaves an imprint that can make a difference in your digital marketing performance for years to come. Yes, there are always opportunities to optimize and improve – add more value, multimedia, interactivity, and more. But any piece of content you publish this week could be helping you in 12 months.

Each piece of content contributes to your overall visibility in Google and other search engines. Every piece of content has the potential to go viral in the future. On a more practical level, those pieces will be drawing your website visitors deeper into your content ecosystem long after they were first crafted.

For those reasons, it’s essential to align the elements of your brand and ensure that even your early forays into content marketing will stand the test of time. When content is developed with customer needs at the forefront, you can revisit it in the future to extend it or recycle it into other types of content.

4. Brand Voice Must Be Clear

What’s the overall message? Consistency and clarity build trust. This is true of brands just as it is with people. When you spend time with people who have common ground, you naturally deepen your bond. Brands can’t show up to help their customers move house, but they can demonstrate relatable values.

Studies show that customers want to work with businesses that represent what they believe in. That might include things like environmental responsibility or corporate stewardship. They also want brands that speak knowledgeably about their needs and have unambiguous value propositions to help them.

Many companies jump into digital marketing first, then come up with in-house style guides and brand guides further down the road. We recommend incorporating these assets from the beginning – so everything in your brand portfolio contributes to the same recognizable whole you want your customers to trust.

New York Ave Is Your “Long Haul” Strategic Marketing Agency

Some of these thoughts might seem complicated or even impractical. New York Ave brings them down to earth. Our team will help you define and execute a marketing strategy that moves the needle on your goals, not only today, but for years to come. Contact us to find out more or get started today.