{"id":63542,"date":"2020-08-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rockcontent.com\/blog\/the-long-and-the-short-of-it\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T16:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:12:07","slug":"the-long-and-the-short-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/the-long-and-the-short-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long and the Short of it \u2014 and the implications for Content and Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I think about the brands I’ve been working with or consulting in the last few years, the majority of them in the B2B tech space, short-term sales activation<\/strong> (or lead gen<\/a>, as we B2B marketers are used to call it) has always been the first priority.<\/p>\n

Enterprises invested most of the money in the short-term, bottom of the funnel campaigns \u2014 and related content \u2014 in the hope of lifting sales for the next few quarters. <\/p>\n

I had a similar priority when I led marketing for division of a large enterprise in the field of Energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The brand was not a focus. Short-term activation campaigns and sales programs were successful in most of the cases. At least, this is what I (and most marketers) thought.<\/p>\n

The latest research of Les Binet<\/a> and Peter Field<\/a>, Effectiveness in Context<\/a>, analyses hundreds of campaigns of the IPA Databank, with a focus on marketing effectiveness.<\/p>\n

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\"efectiviness<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

According to Binet and Field, marketing effectiveness is in decline, and “short-termism” is, in many ways, the mother of all marketing problems. <\/p>\n

What exactly happened? <\/p>\n

As I have mentioned, marketers are increasingly short-term in their focus. They spend money on immediate sales activation rather than longer-term brand building. They opt for bottom of the funnel tactics because they will pay better in most cases in one year. <\/p>\n

But in one of the most important sections of their research, Field and Binet demonstrate that over the longer term, this short-termism will rapidly deteriorate the overall impact of marketing. <\/p>\n

Too much time spent picking the low-hanging fruit means less time watering the tree. Eventually, the tree stops growing.<\/p>\n

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\"efectiviness<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Also, distracted by a continuous flow of short-term data, marketers won’t realize that something eventually will go wrong. And when they will, it could be too late.<\/p>\n

There are additional notable discoveries mentioned on the latest research:<\/p>\n