How much time do you give your marketing to work?
In this Amazon Prime world we’re lead to believe we can have what we want the same day, and in some cases people believe this of their marketing.
Switch on a new campaign and we should get leads straight away right?
Wrong!
Marketing of any kind takes time to work, but how long should you give it?
I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” answer to this question, but as a rule I tend to ask clients to consider a tactic for at least three months before making a call on success or failure, and even then the green shoots may only start appearing.
The danger is, if you switch a tactic off too soon, you may be denying your business a profitable lead generation channel.
To know whether something is working, there’s a few things you need in place:
- Clear objectives to measure success against
- Tracking software – i.e. Google Analytics or Google Ads conversion tracking
- Reporting – the ability to extract data from your tracking
- Analysis – the ability to make sense of the reports!
But too often, we engage with marketing tactics without considering the four elements above, and are left wondering whether what we’re doing is really working or not.
Now, of course different tactics take a different amount of time to work. Search Engine Optimisation for instance needs 6-12 months to gauge success.
But, as a rule for most tactics I tend to suggest three months before we’ll even consider deciding on four possible outcomes.
- The test is a success and we should consider scaling up
- The results are promising and we should continue with the test
- The results are inconclusive and we should continue adapting the test
- The results are negative and we should stop this test for now
I also think to give a deadline on a test is 100% required in order to allow time to gather data, analyse it and report back the findings.
So, the key takeaways from this edition of Grow With Steve are:
- Give marketing tactics time to succeed or fail
- Don’t give up too soon or you might be missing an opportunity
- Make sure you have tracking and measuring in place
- Hire someone that knows how to interpret the data
- Even if something isn’t working now, it doesn’t mean it won’t in the future
I hope that’s been useful and at least given you food for thought.