The desire for instant gratification is often part and parcel of human nature, whether you’re looking at the world as a customer or as a business owner or marketer. As the path to purchase fragments, and micro moments and personalization become more important, immediate gratification becomes easier for the customer. However, as tempting as it is to look at marketing ROI in the same way, business owners need to remember that advertising is an investment, and advertising success and brand development take time to achieve.

Your advertising strategy should never be developed as a short-term fix, especially since most of the time, you won’t see immediate results from your advertising efforts. Trying to force it to function that way will only undermine the impact your strategy has on your revenue. By building a campaign with a long-term perspective that accounts for customers entering the buying funnel at different times instead, you can see positive results sooner. How quickly you can drive solid, steady results will vary based on many factors.

Goals and Strategy

At its most basic, a goal will directly determine the length of time necessary to see results based on the nature of that goal. For instance, if you run a campaign around bringing more attendees to an in-store event or generating more sales by utilizing a promotion, you’ll see your results within the time frame of the event or promotion. Note that you’ll still need plenty of lead time to be effective. On the other hand, if your goal is brand awareness, you need a much longer period to build your brand as a recognizable entity. This is especially true of brands that are pioneering new industries, products, services, or trends, largely because the audience needs to be both educated about the new offerings as well as convinced of their value. However, even brands that capitalize on proven markets will take time to build awareness because they’ll need to prove they’re unique from the competition.

Advertising Factors

Obviously, the tactics that you utilize to reach the goals you develop will directly impact both your level of success and the speed at which you achieve success. Below we’ve listed some of the most important factors, but it’s important to remember that these aren’t the only elements that will impact your advertising.

Branding

Branding includes the brand awareness we mentioned above. For this point, we’re specifically referring to that awareness coupled with whether or not the audience trusts your brand. A relatively unknown, untested business will need a longer period to earn that recognition and trust, which means more will need to be invested into marketing to achieve meaningful ROI. Similarly, if you’re well known but not well trusted, it’s going to take time to earn back consumer trust and see revenue lift attributed to advertising. However, if the audience is small, being well known to that audience and already having their trust means that your business will need to spend less time advertising to achieve your goals.

Targeting

Knowing your target market and how to reach them effectively is critical to your ROI. That’s because you won’t be wasting your advertising investment on an audience that isn’t interested in your products and services. Additional investments may be required to do the market research required to understand your customers and develop detailed segments. Once you’ve done this, it influences the following points.

Creative

Understanding your target audience and the segments within it will help you develop ad creative that’s tailored to their needs, interests, and desires. This helps you stand out from the competition, especially when you align your unique selling proposition along with it. It’s also the first step to moving forward with a tactic that’s becoming more and more important — personalization. The more the customer feels the message they receive applies to their situation, the easier it is for them to convert and ultimately pay for products and services. Again, you won’t be wasting ad spend on vague messaging, and this level of targeting directly improves ROI.

Channels

In an increasingly omnichannel world that’s constantly evolving to include more and more channels, targeting allows you to avoid wasting advertising dollars on any channels that aren’t valuable to your business. You can focus your spend on the channels where your customers are actually present, and you can wait to incorporate new channels for when your customers have a meaningful presence there. It also improves ROI because of its impact on frequency, namely offering additional avenues for customers to receive your creative.

Frequency

Frequency refers to the number of times a customer needs to hear or see your message to recall the ad, remember your brand, or be inspired to take action. It will help you develop the number of touchpoints you need to achieve conversion, and you won’t waste ad spend by either over-committing to outreach or not putting out enough marketing to actually make an impact.

Timing

Understanding your target audience also reveals the best times to make an impact with your creative. Sometimes, this is about time of year — Christmas shopping, for instance, starts much, much earlier than many businesses think, and knowing when your customers will begin planning to shop and actually begin shopping allows you to provide information and offers that will actually influence them at the right point in the buyer’s funnel. Sometimes this is as nuanced as the time of day — for example, dayparting your radio ads can limit the amount you spend to when your audience is the most likely to actually hear the ad. Similarly, the amount of lead time you need to develop a campaign and the amount of time the ad campaign needs to run will impact your investment as well as eventual success. However, there’s more to timing than just being an element of the advertising itself.

Strategy Timing

The timing of individual campaigns or even individual ads isn’t the only thing that will impact marketing ROI. Your overall strategy will require time to build impact, specifically to reach the audience, for the audience to recognize and remember your brand and message, and for the message and brand experience to resonate with the audience. If the factors we listed above are well-planned, strategically executed, and aligned with your marketing bridge, success is likely to occur more quickly. Similarly, if there is an immediate need for your product or services, that will also expedite your success. However, building your brand will more often than not take years to truly accomplish. Below we examine other timing elements that will impact your ability to achieve success.

Testing

A quick way to waste your money is to create an advertising campaign and never bother to determine whether or not it’s working. The first aspect to ensuring you’re spending your marketing dollars the right way is to commit to testing. You should examine how each of the advertising factors we listed above impacts your revenue and whether those impacts change over the course of the campaign. As an example, social media channels may be more beneficial in the middle of the buyer’s funnel, whereas blogging is important at either the beginning or end. Similarly, the frequency necessary to inspire action may not need to be as high at the beginning of the funnel as it is at the end, or vice versa. These may even vary between audience segments, but you won’t know if you aren’t testing. What’s more, when testing your creative, you can avoid running any creative that doesn’t show promising impact.

Tracking

Once you move beyond testing, tracking is the way you can ensure that your campaign stays on track. Bearing in mind that an omnichannel marketing mix means that sometimes attribution can be a little complicated, it’s important to develop benchmarks at every level and for every ad, so you can clearly identify positive and negative impacts when measured against your bottom line. Consider measuring elements like foot traffic and in-store sales, online sales, coupon redemption (physical or code), lead generation, landing page traffic, organic traffic, social media conversion, and others. Be sure you develop your benchmarks in conjunction with your goals, so you don’t get distracted by vanity analytics that don’t accurately reflect success. By actively monitoring your tracking, you can also stop a campaign that isn’t working before you waste much money on it, or conversely, discover new opportunities and capitalize on tactics that work well for other campaigns.

Analyzing

We can’t emphasize enough that your tracking always needs to be measured against your budget and changes in revenue. Utilize large, meaningful chunks of time, and always be sure that you’re giving your campaigns the time and money each needs to achieve your goals. This may be monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually.

Remember, the best advertising strategy is one developed with the understanding that marketing is an investment, and as such, advertising success takes time to come to fruition. When your goals, tactics, and strategy timetable matching your marketing bridge are well executed, you’ll see improved marketing ROI that lifts your bottom line in a reasonable amount of time that you can plan for.