Wow. This is a tough one to write. But it’s important to discuss, we’ve had lots of examples of either impatience or pleasant surprise. Marketing activities take time to work and marketing expectations are high. Let’s take the adage… It takes eight touches with a brand before a consumer buys. Just take that in for a second… Eight. It’s actually a lot more than you think.
So, what are marketing expectations, well you spend your hard earned money on a marketing consultant, specialist or agency and you expect a return. Absolutely. But what’s a real expectation on time for that return on investment.
The answer unfortunately is complex and takes a longer look at each individual company, website and competition. Boring! Yes boring, so we are going to speak from experience and look at the cases we’ve dealt with to start to give you some guidelines on what to expect.
PPC – pay per click
Yes, PPC first. There is a joke in Father of 4 that Devon is the Peacock and I’m the organ grinder. PPC can be a quick route to quick results. But is it as quick as your marketing expectations?
Generally speaking, it’s give or take whether you see positive leads on return for B2B early on, we’ve seen some accounts have nothing and some have accounts have very few. But why? You are paying for them…
The answer again is complex but put simply – Google is gathering data and we (or your agency) should be filtering the results to remove anything worthless to you. This moves your key measurements around, such as impressions, clicks, cost per acquisition etc. Ideally a good spend on Google AdWords is over £3000 per month. This gives you access to data more quickly, allows you to shape your ads and get to the best result more quickly. £5000 spent with Google gets you to amazing amounts of data and you can be king or queen of the PPC world. There are caveats, at that level of spend you will know if you can profit from using AdWords. Not all businesses have the margin nor the market saturation to get great results or profitable ones.
But all of this is down to your budget, as an agency we give two options, low and slow, or quick attack. This allows us to manage your expectations on what we can achieve on your AdWords.
So, in our experience, expect very little return on investment towards the end of your first month and then expect months 2 and 3 will grow. As discussed, your budget will dictate this and how good your PPC person gives the results a sway too.
SEO – search engine optimisation
SEO is the organ grinder, cheaper traffic and slower off the mark, but the tortoise is well worth the look.
Let’s be frankly honest with your expectations, 3 to 12 months. What? I hear you scream, well that’s what’s touted on the internet. We have been very fortunate here at Father of 4 not to have seen anything take over four months.
From our experience we’ve had results in a matter of days, yes that really happened, and the worst we’ve seen is four months.
Why such a spread of expectational time? SEO has a huge checklist, like massive… Covering technical website issues, content, keyword and back links. For a website to be awesome in organic results you need all of them firing. A speedy and technically gifted website with awesome content delivered at the right part of the customer journey based around the right keywords and the website has lots of high authority back links. That was a long sentence, honestly, I’ve spent ten minutes trying to make it smaller, but nothing I wrote made the point correctly! SEO activity creates a checklist of around 900 items, the best start here is getting a good SEO audit done on your website. Then us or your agency know where to begin and what they have to do to improves your SEO and more importantly your expectations.
Email advertising
Easy, send out an email and watch the sales come in, right? Wrong. E-ads aren’t a quick way to cash in I’m afraid.
Let’s go back to my opening statement, the adage that it takes eight touches for a consumer to purchase. That’s eight emails and in our experience that’s about right. Yes, you will have some innovators ready to pounce on your email, but optimum time is about eight emails to start getting a good return on investment.
Social Media
Social Media all down to the platform. We’ll focus on Facebook now. Just look at recent events in the news, I’m not going to give my political viewpoints, but social media is highly trusted and does take less touches to get a purchase.
We have recently put a well-known brand onto Facebook advertising and sales came in on week 1. Barely seen on any other marketing platform, it’s brilliant for remarketing as well as its own advertising platform.
So my expectations are high, what do I choose?
The answer is predictable, and you will groan. You choose omni channel and use as many channels as your budget will let you. Your marketing expectations depend on you, but if they are high then omni channel is the future.
Why? Because it takes eight touches to get someone to buy, so if they find you, utilise AdWords, Facebook and email sign ups to increase your touch points with that person and become a lean mean marketing machine… Omni channel let’s you be a peacock.
