Content Marketing: Playing the Long Game for Lasting Success

Here is a hard truth: most content marketing channels won’t pay off immediately.

Content marketing relies on the customer finding your channel and taking an interest in it. For many channels, it takes a bare minimum of six months to grow your digital presence enough to start seeing statistically significant results.

Content marketing may take longer, but the payoff can be much greater than other forms of marketing. Content marketing is a long-term investment that continues to pay off for years to come. Blog posts continue to bring traffic to your website, social media continues to spread brand awareness, and leads continue to opt into your email list over time. These are all channels that continue to grow over the long term.

These content strategies are a marathon, not a sprint.

They require time and dedication to do well and contribute to a more robust marketing strategy. For example, social media spreads brand awareness while ads get warm leads to purchase. Successful businesses use all marketing channels to create a dynamic campaign. This is why investing in a whole marketing team and allowing the time to grow these channels is essential to success.

Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Brand Social Media Marketing?

One channel that often gets overlooked or passed onto one person is social media. This is why there are so many lackluster professional social media presences that are not contributing to the success of a business. So, of course, that budget gets cut and it’s the marketing manager’s job to pick up the slack. This makes us cringe so hard because we know what is possible with a real social media strategy and a dedicated team to implement it.

Many businesses use social media posts as ads and post a picture with a CTA like “go buy our stuff.” This is not a strategy. Social media marketing is not the end of the buyer’s journey; it is the beginning. It is a channel used to grow brand awareness and build trust, which takes time. But all that waiting is not in vain. There are numerous benefits to playing the long game of social media.

The Benefits of a Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy

→ Building Relationships: Long-term engagement allows your brand to build meaningful relationships with your audience, fostering loyalty and trust.

→ Social Listening: Regular use of interactive content (polls, Q&A sessions, live videos) increases engagement and gives you valuable insights into your audience.

→ Authenticity: Over time, consistently sharing your brand’s story, values, and behind-the-scenes content helps to humanize your brand, building deeper connections with your audience.

→ Analytics and Insights: Long-term social media activity provides valuable and informative data on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics, enabling more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

→ Trust and Credibility: As you build trust and credibility with your audience over time, they are more likely to convert from followers to customers.

→ Cost-Effective Marketing: The cumulative effect of long-term social media efforts often leads to a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to short-term campaigns.

How Long Does It Take To See Results From Social Media Marketing?

We live in the social media space 24/7, nerding out on analytics. We know six months is the bare minimum amount of time before we see real results. Yes, we can see results far before those six months are up, but it’s not enough data to make informed decisions for the success of your social media. This is why our done-for-you social media marketing packages have a minimum six-month commitment.

But here is the good news: in those six months, you can look forward to seeing engagement improve, followers increase, increased profile views, and other improvements. This does not mean that you only need to invest in six months of social media management; it’s a longer-term commitment, with many marketers reporting that the length of social media commitment directly relates to the amount of increase in sales.

So before you start changing up your social media marketing efforts, ask yourself if it’s in the budget to commit for the long term. Fortunately for you and your team, you won’t have to interview, hire, and train a whole social media team if you don’t want to. Hiring an agency like ours takes all that stress out of the picture, in addition to lowering the budget required to have access to a whole team of experts.

content marketing social media