Having worked with hundreds of clients over the years, I have had my fair share of comms about the “timeline to leads.” It’s always a sensitive topic for both sides, as marketing is the top-down driver to gathering those leads. Still, marketing is a science. An effective marketing strategy takes time to develop the best channel mix, messaging, branding, and targeting through regular analysis and testing to build a better mousetrap.
For the client, the leads are why they have invested in a marketing strategy for the season, so urgency is always a factor, which is totally understandable.
Quantity vs. Quality Leads
The fact is, fast results are not often good results. Ad campaigns can be built in a few hours, including graphics, launched and tracked, and may easily start seeing impressions and clicks a day in. But what is the quality of those leads? How was the audience targeting set? How was the messaging and creative built, and what action was the ad intended to drive and to where? Was the action meant to take place on your website? On a social page? On the app store?
If a form being submitted to your website was the action you are tracking as a lead, do you have a blind landing page where that form lives so you can confirm the conversion came from a specific campaign?
See, it isn’t that leads are the target. Marketing or Sales Qualified Leads are. To truly drive these convertible leads, you need a marketing strategy that is clearly defined across all channels, tactics, and creative assets. And that build takes time.
This is even more accurate in the digital marketing space. As marketers using online tools. we have a ton of data at our disposal that offers detailed insight into the performance of every tactic and asset in your plan. To do the job right, we need time to do the initial work to build a custom marketing strategy and test campaigns, as well as track results to gauge the need to adjust messaging, targeting, or creativity to improve results. Then, you use that test data to build the formal campaign, which means more time has passed.
See how often that word comes up? If you’re a business owner needing results, it can be hard to be patient and allow your marketing team to do the necessary homework, research, and analysis to build a strategic marketing plan to drive quality leads.
We get it. We totally get it. But here’s the quandary:
Without deep-diving into your competitors (at least 2) and your target audience(s) and analyzing your existing pages, platforms, and profiles for messaging and branding consistency and optimization, you are building a marketing strategy with blinders on, and your lead quality will show that lack of effort.
An Effective Marketing Strategy Has to be Intentional, Specific and Traceable
As I mentioned previously, we have a plethora of data available to us in real time. To do the work right and ensure the best results, we need to take the time to analyze the critical data that guide a strategic build. These criteria are:
- Competitive Research: Review your website and platforms against your top 2-3 competitors to gauge your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) in the market.
- Market Research: Using social media listening tools, polls, ABM, and even data from your competitors, gauge where your market spends time online, what drives them to engage with a brand, and the messaging that works for them.
- Platform and Page Analysis: Review your client’s existing pages and platforms for banding consistencies, optimization, and cadence/variance of content marketing.
Your marketing team can use this information to build out A/B tests for your target campaigns, which should run for two weeks to gauge engagement with your target audiences. While they are running, you can use the time to build out an editorial calendar for all channels and creatives to go with that content and develop your dashboards to track the performance of all assets in play.
The entire research and testing timeline can take anywhere from 2 weeks to a month, depending on the complexities of your industry, your competition, your existing brand baseline, and how much cleanup has to be done to launch. You don’t want to launch campaigns that drive down a broken bridge, as in a slow-loading website, a landing page with poor messaging, inconsistent branding across channels, or error-ridden creative assets.
Time is a Necessary Component of an Effective Marketing Strategy
As you can see, time is necessary to do solid marketing planning and implementation. Time is needed to analyze performance and assess results for all your marketing efforts. Time is necessary to allow your market to learn about and begin to engage with your brand. Yes, it sounds arduous, but like a good carpenter, a good marketer always wants to measure twice (or thrice) and cut once. The results will be tangibly better when you do.
