Although revisiting your marketing strategy regularly is a smart approach, your company can greatly benefit from having a long-term plan as well. With a long-term marketing strategy, you can drive the success of your company and ensure it remains sustainable through the years. 

With the combination of a short- and long-term strategy, you can meet goals over a smaller time frame while planning for the future growth of your business. You can get started by exploring the five things marketers should know about building a long-term marketing strategy – and then, take action to bring it into fruition.

1. Focus on the Big Picture

To get the most out of your long-term marketing strategy, you must focus on efforts that will drive results further down the road. You might establish strategies around building brand awareness, for example, as your first step toward becoming a household name. Once you dial in your focus for your long-term plan, you can start building your short-term strategy with the steps that will help you achieve your main objectives.

2. Leave Space for Flexibility

With each campaign you run, you could hit the ball out of the park and drive sales like crazy – or fall flat without much return on investment (ROI). Either way, you need to have space in your long-term plan for the flexibility to make necessary adjustments along the way. Otherwise, your long-term plan could serve to hinder the growth and success of your company.

By ensuring your plan remains flexible, you can use campaign results, marketing trends and other data to trigger changes that enhance your marketing efforts and improve your ROI. You also leave room for marketing changes needed to ensure successful product and service launches and other key events.

3. Use the Right Tactics

Your marketing strategy needs to center around the right combination of tactics to ensure you can craft effective advertisements and deliver them through the right channels. A winning combination of marketing tactics includes:

• Branding
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Radio
• Social media
• Content marketing

By paying close attention to all these key areas, you can create a long-term marketing strategy that really pays off.

4. Keep Messaging Consistent and Frequent

Consistency and frequency both come into play in creating a long-term marketing strategy that boosts your ROI. In following a consistent marketing plan, you can build awareness of your brand by regularly engaging with your target audience. Dialing up the frequency to at least three exposures can help to ensure your marketing hits the sweet spot of optimal reach and engagement.

You can reach your consistency and frequency goals by working the 21 52 advertising plan from Zimmer into your long-term strategy. Through this method, you will air 21 radio ads per week for 52 weeks a year to regularly reach your target audience.

5. Consult with Your Marketing Partner

Beyond simply running your ads, Zimmer can act as your marketing partner, which is an important part of any long-term strategy. When you have a dedicated marketing partner, it is possible to lean on their experience and expertise to amplify the success of all your campaigns. You can also tap into all their digital and traditional advertising services to create relevant ads that reach your ideal customers wherever they spend their time.

When you focus on creating a long-term marketing strategy, and support it with short-term objectives, you can boost brand awareness, engage with your target audience and increase conversion rates across the board. As you work on reaching this goal, keep the areas above in mind to achieve great success now and in the future.