The Marketing Long Game: How to Build Sustainable Success

Polly Buckland

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 85% of B2B businesses see lead generation as their most important marketing goal, surprising absolutely nobody. But a study by APSIS reveals that 68% of all businesses feel like they’re really struggling with lead generation.
So where’s the disconnect?

The Pressure of Short-Termism

Introducing ‘short-termism’. Your new favourite phrase to drop when you’re fighting your marketing corner (again). Essentially it’s when we’re expected to do more for less; when budgets are cut, or during exciting high-growth periods, our focus naturally shrinks to immediate results. This short-term thinking always comes at the expense of longer-term brand-building efforts that drive steady, sustainable growth. It’s a tale as old as time… or at least the last few decades. “You have to produce results in the short-term, but you also have to produce results in the long-term. And the long-term is not simply the adding up of short-terms.” – Peter Drucker, ‘the man who invented management’

What's going on?

The State of B2B Marketing Today

B2B Marketing has changed dramatically over the past few years, and marketers are feeling the strain. According to Forbes, a whopping 83% of marketers report experiencing burnout because of short-term pressures. So the question is, how can we reduce some of this pressure while becoming happier marketers, more productive, and more effective in our roles?

Long-Term Consistency vs. Short-Term Intensity

We’ve all seen the professional growth diagrams that contrast short-term intensity with long-term consistency. When it comes to marketing, my recommendation is clear: aim for long-term consistency rather than short-term intensity.

Sure, we can all spend thousands of pounds on a one-off event or turn on aggressive ad campaigns to generate quick (expensive) leads. But these will always be short-term bursts of lead generation. And the fall from these heights can be painful if you don’t have proper foundations or a buffer in place.

"When it comes to marketing, my recommendation is clear: aim for long-term consistency rather than short-term intensity."

Polly Buckland

How to Play the Marketing Long Game

1. Establish a Rock-Solid Strategy

The foundation of playing the marketing long game is a robust, current strategy. This isn’t about dusting off a five-year-old document – it’s about understanding who your clients are today at a deeper level:

What type of content do they consume? What are their beliefs and habits?
What challenges are they facing?
What impact can you have on them?

Put real effort into developing a strategy that’s relevant to where your business is now, not where it was years ago, when you last had the time to check.

2. Focus on Marketing Hygiene

The second pillar is maintaining excellent hygiene in your ongoing marketing activities:

Don’t build a website and neglect optimisation
Avoid sending generic newsletters to your entire mailing list without proper segmentation
Move away from mass generic communications (short-term thinking)
Strategically segment your audience and personalise messages to build relationships (long-term behaviour)

the 3% rule

Expanding Your Audience of Opportunity

The 3% rule by Chet Holmes is such a valuable framework for understanding your market. Most businesses focus solely on the top 10% – active buyers or those intending to change soon. It’s a small pond that everyone’s fishing in, and if your customers are price buyers, it quickly becomes a race to the bottom. Instead, look at the middle 60% – those who might have a need but aren’t quite ready yet, or don’t realise they need what you offer. By fishing in this larger pond, you gain the freedom to build relationships with people over time. This is where your long game truly begins.

The 7-11-4 Rule

Building Trust Through Content

Google’s 7-11-4 theory suggests that to move someone from not knowing you at all to knowing, liking, and trusting you enough to purchase, they need to see:

Seven hours of content
Over eleven interactions
Across four different locations

In practice, this might mean half an hour of content consumption counts as one interaction in one location – whether that’s on your website, YouTube channel, or LinkedIn post.

That’s a lot of content! But remember, it’s not about churning out low-quality material through ChatGPT.

At The Typeface Group, we’ve developed a content creation process that’s thoughtful, reduces marketing waste, and maximises the value of your time, energy, and investment.

Real-Life Success Stories

Once you’ve assessed the current state of play, the key is identifying and focusing on areas that will deliver the best return. For our client TreatBox, we focused our efforts on:

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B2B Waste-to-Energy Client

Over 18 months of playing the long game with us, this client has seen:

106% increase in website conversions (actual enquiries via form submissions)
207% increase in organic traffic
56.4% of all conversions now coming from organic acquisition paths

When they came to us, they were effectively held hostage by a paid ads company and were primarily generating leads through inefficient paid channels. We stripped everything back, they committed to the long game, and now they’re seeing tremendous results – so much so that they’ve hired a new paid ads company to complement their organic success.

B2C E-Commerce

In just nine months compared to the previous nine-month period, this client has achieved:

£121,000 in additional revenue from organic traffic
73% increase in sales from organic channels
Data tracking that shows exactly how much revenue each blog post has earned

These clients held their nerve, stayed consistent, and are now reaping the rewards.

Maintaining Consistency

The Content Creation System

Based on a decade of insights, here’s our framework for efficiently and effectively producing content:

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1. Content Ideation

Don’t rely on a single “marketing sage” for all your ideas. Engage your entire organisation:

Senior leadership team
Technical teams
Customer service
Engineers
Anyone with expertise who interacts with customers

Set up a simple spreadsheet where they can contribute ideas. This method engages stakeholders early in the content creation process and brings in perspectives from those closer to the customer than marketing might be.

2. Two-Factor Qualification

Filter ideas through a two-factor qualification process:

Is it strategically aligned with your business goals?
Is it commercially viable? (Have your SEO lead assess search volume, competition, and angle)

This helps you only invest time in content you know will deliver business value. An added benefit: when senior leaders see their suggested content published, they’re more likely to share it on their channels, amplifying your reach and encouraging advocacy from other members of the team.

3. Systematic Content Planning

Systemise your content creation process. Don’t rely on written to-do lists where items can drop off.

At The Typeface Group, we use ClickUp and schedule our own content as if we’re a client – with clear assignments, peer review processes, and fixed upload dates.

This system is how we maintain consistency.

4. Expert-Driven Content Creation

If you’ve gathered expert input during ideation, carry it through to creation:

Interview your technical experts and leadership team members with decades of experience
Extract their gold and weave it into your content
Don’t expect junior copywriters to convey expert-level insights without this crucial step

5. Regular Content Monitoring and Optimisation

Don’t just publish and forget:

Conduct regular content audits
Keep only relevant and rich content on your website
Update and republish older content with new insights rather than creating multiple thin pieces on the same topic
Build authority around cornerstone content rather than fragmenting your expertise

Get efficient

Optimising Your Marketing Efforts

The Marketing Activity Matrix

To refocus your efforts and potentially reduce workload, try this simple exercise.

Plot your marketing activities on a matrix with:

Horizontal axis: Effectiveness in generating leads (low to high)
Vertical axis: Budget effectiveness (low to high)

When facing budget cuts or limited resources, prioritise activities in the bottom-right quadrant – high lead generation with low cost. This guarantees you’re investing your time and money on high-value activities before spending on awareness-building initiatives.

Maximise Content Value Through Distribution

Squeeze every drop of value from the content you create:

Repurpose across multiple channels and formats
For every hour spent creating content, spend an equal amount of time promoting it
Consider all possible distribution channels for major content pieces like annual reports

For example, this blog post started as a talk, became a webinar, will be embedded on our website, chopped up for TikTok, shared on LinkedIn, and forms part of our online training course.

Finding Your Balance

Let’s agree on how to allocate your marketing time:

40% on foundational work (strategy, messaging)
30% on creating excellent content
30% on distributing and recycling content

The results? You’ll flatten the lead generation curve, find your focus, do more of what works, smooth out peaks and troughs, stop being order-takers, secure more budget, gain clarity, and improve forecasting accuracy.

Need Help Getting Started?

If you like these ideas but don’t know where to begin, join The Better Content Club to gain access to the clubhouse – a training programme that provides all our tips, tricks, templates, and processes to support you and your marketing team.