There’s so much that goes into developing a successful marketing campaign. You have to brainstorm the concept, set goals, define your target audience, and dig into the details of what channels you’ll use, what kind of content you’ll create, and how you’ll launch your campaign.
It would be a shame to do all of this work and not get any results. Unfortunately, this is the reality for many marketers. But it may not be because their campaigns are deficient. Instead, it could be that they aren’t giving their campaigns enough time to generate results.
The truth is, marketing campaigns take time to show results. Let’s look at this in more detail below.
Why Marketing Results Take Time to Show Themselves
Whether you’ve launched a campaign to get more engagement on social media, garner interest in a new product, or achieve another marketing goal, results take time to show themselves for various reasons. These four are the most notable reasons.
People need time to see your campaigns
Of course, there are instances where marketing campaigns go viral and results happen quickly. But this isn’t the norm. People need time to see and engage with your campaigns.
They may need to come across your content a few times before they absorb your messaging and interact with your content. Your results will be much more comprehensive when a good amount of people see your campaigns. But you must give them time to do this.
Your budget isn’t big
The bigger the marketing budget, the more you can do to generate results quickly.
For example, let’s say you’re launching a PPC ad campaign. If you can increase your ad spend, you can get more volume and spread your ads across more than one network. A bigger budget also allows you to work with ad specialists who can help you get better results and stay competitive.
This isn’t to say a small marketing budget won’t generate significant results. It’ll just take more time, creativity, and effort for this to happen.
It depends on the type of marketing you’re doing
Every campaign isn’t the same. The type of marketing you’re doing in each one absolutely matters when it comes to how quickly your campaigns yield results. There are many effective marketing strategies for businesses.
For example, you can lean into search engine optimization (SEO) and optimize your website so that it shows up high in search engine results. It’ll take longer to get results from this strategy if you’re relying solely on organic traffic. Combined paid and organic SEO tactics have a better chance of generating faster results.
Or, let’s say you’re incorporating video marketing in your campaigns. People are starting to prefer video content over any other type of content. So, creating engaging videos to support your marketing campaigns could yield results faster than if you didn’t include video content.
When your results come depends largely on the type of marketing and strategy you’re pursuing.
What are you tracking?
If you aren’t familiar with metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), here’s a brief overview:
- Metrics are what you’re measuring to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign
- KPIs are the specific things you’re tracking to see your progress toward a goal
An example of a metric is content engagement. An example of a KPI is monthly website traffic. Keep in mind that all KPIs are metrics, but all metrics aren’t KPIs. Their small differences matter when you’re trying to generate results faster with your campaigns.
For instance, if you’ve set a goal to garner more engagement with your ads, a good KPI to track is click-through rate. Click-through rate measures how many people see an ad and actually click on it.
If your click-through rate is low, you can optimize elements of your ad, like who it’s targeting and where it’s placed, to see if that helps. However, give your ads a few months to see initial results and gauge whether adjustments are needed.
Actively measuring your campaign success through metrics and KPIs will help you finetune your strategies at key points to get results.
How Long Will It Really Take?
Truthfully, how long it will take for your marketing campaigns to yield results depends on many factors, including the ones above. There’s a lot of research out there on how long you should give a marketing campaign. We’ve seen 45 days, six weeks, 90 days, six months, and up to two years.
The point is, campaign results won’t be instantaneous. The more time you give your campaigns to blossom, the better.
Here’s How You Can Fast-track Results
If you don’t want to wait a long time for campaign results, we get it. Although there’s no way around waiting at least some time for quality results, you can decrease the overall time it takes for them to show up by doing the following.
Know your target audience
Many marketers make the mistake of launching campaigns with a general audience in mind. This slows their results down tremendously, whether they know it or not.
Targeting a specific audience is a much smarter approach when the goal is to get results quickly. When you get your message across to the right audience at the right time, they’ll be more likely to convert, fast-tracking your results.
That means you must get to know your target audience before launching any campaign. Access and analyze any data you’ve collected thus far on your target audience. Lean into consumer insights, specifically, to understand:
- Where they are when they use your products or come across your brand
- What they’re looking for when searching for your business type or products
- What influences them to use your products and engage with your brand
- When your audience thinks about you and your products and in what context
You can use everything you know about your target audience to tailor your campaigns to them, fast-tracking your results.
Create quality content
Good campaign results come because your audience resonates with the campaign. It could be the messaging. It could be the calls-to-action (CTAs) you use. It could be the supporting visuals you use to accompany the written content. At the end of the day, it’s quality content that drives a successful campaign.
Focus on creating high-quality content for every campaign. First, map out everything you’ll create for a campaign down to the tiniest detail. This includes the message you’re promoting, the visuals you’ll use, how much written content there will be, the color of the CTA button, and how you’ll place links.
Then, give yourself time to create the content. If you need and can afford to hire a team of content creators, a videographer, a photographer, and a graphic designer, do it. Even if you’re tackling content creation alone, block off days in your calendar to ensure this is manageable.
Conclusion
Expecting instant results with your marketing campaigns isn’t realistic. It will take time for them to yield initial results, and even more time after you make adjustments. So, it’s best to get comfortable with the journey that marketing is, rather than rushing through it to get results. Patience. It’s all about patience.
