Too often marketing campaigns that brands create are too short lived online. It takes too many resources to do an initial push and drive traffic to landing pages that will just eventually be torn down. There are instances where this makes senses, like a valentines day themed promotional page but most of the time it’s costly, risks losing followers and squanders potential.

I think there are three reasons that campaigns are forgotten so soon – online is treated like a physical retail store with limited space, too many campaigns live on social media which is inherently fleeting and traditional marketing departments incorrectly assume that if it doesn’t take off at launch it never will.

An advertising campaign in a physical store is different – there is limited space and a store can have only one look at a time so you better make it the latest and greatest. Online you have infinite space for unlimited landing page designs and concepts. Why limit yourself with arbitrary end dates?

A campaign that involves inviting people to pin to Pinterest, “tweet to win”, upload to Instagram, create a board at Polyvore or interact with a Facebook status update has a ticking expiration date the moment it’s posted (studies show social media lasts on average as little as 3 hours). To get the most out of a campaign build it in on your owned domain where it can have a long life, use social to let people know about it initially and then let people continually discover it as time goes on.

Not everyone is interested in a campaign at the same time. For most things we all fall into the mass market, we wait to see what the reviews say, what makes the best-of lists, becomes cheap and is widely adopted. But each of us is an early adopter for some specific category or genre. I am the first in line for Tim Armstrong’s latest but am the biggest laggard for the latest cool restaurant. The problem is that brands obsess only about the launch and as soon as its launched they’re off to the next sexy thing.

• It takes time to gain inbound links and crawl up in search rank, Google is designed to work in favor of content that sticks around.
• More time will give you an opportunity to collect data and from new insights.
• Use broader keywords in the content with a more evergreen perspective in mind.
• Give those early adopters on social media time to recommend it to the masses who choose to wait and haven’t decided to take the leap yet.

Just because something doesn’t take off right away doesnt mean its not worth sticking with – especially online, it doesn’t take much effort to design something to last.