The 4 pilars of sustainable marketing

Trying to sustain a business through a campaign-led approach becomes unsustainable. Without a bottomless budget or a proper follow up, it only derivates in short-lived engagement that generate short lasting spikes of interests in the consumer that inevitably will die without further actions designed to retain their attention.

Reliance on paid media and other marketing challenges, drives the costs of marketing high and does not guarantee consumer loyalty. Isolated campaigns will not be able to develop a consistent brand recognition and do not build long term relationships with customers. Therefore, building a repetitive clientele establishing relationships and holding a consistent delivery of news and options throughout the year, will always be the most sustainable form of marketing.

Taking Airbnb as an example, their path started with a worldwide campaign of paid ads to drive their growth, customer acquisition and global expansion which was supported with a more organic approach through SEO powered content located at their website and harnessing the relationships with their partners and customers through user generated content by inviting people to leave feedback, incentivizing the use of specific hashtags and other actions. This path, decreased their dependency on paid advertisement and reduced their costs. 

The recommended digital ecosystem today, for a brand that desires to rise to the top and prevail consists of 4 Pilars of sustainable marketing. 

• The foundation, the media you own, your website, app, blog, email database. It is smart to invest in SEO, it takes a lot of time and effort to build, but it will be the strong standing structure were your brand can live while the world fluctuates from one social media platform to another.

• After the house is build, you extend your domain with CRM community relationship management, build with a solid social media content strategy, that lives and breathes integrated to your foundation.

• Once you have your foundation, and amplified its reach through social media strategy, then you make a good use of the paid media to accelerate your growth by boosting posts that are already showing results.

• Differentiation is the last pilar, it has to do with the overall experience, both for you and for your audience. Here you make an analysis of all the channels that you are using and their integration, what works, what doesn’t work, which processes needs to improve, where are you wasting resources, where you should add more,  what can be automated and so on to build the best experience.

For a wider understanding of the concept of marketing, read this other article.