Are you giving your marketing enough time?

In marketing especially when you are dealing with paid media, time is our only real limiting factor.
Wouldn’t it be great if you launched a new campaign and immediately all the numbers somehow magically worked out in our favor?
Meaning you automatically put in $1 and make $2, $3, $4? Sure it happens on occasion but very rarely. If it was like that all the time then basically we wouldn’t be in business, and there would be far more super successful companies out there.
Instead what happens is you launch your campaign and find yourself spending $50 to acquire a customer while you only make back $40. Essentially losing $10 for every new customer.
What we find is most people would give that up and mark it off as a failure. But smart marketers know that they are very close to a winner and keep pushing, tweaking, testing, and dialing in the campaign.
Tweak your targeting, test the messaging, tweak your upsell path, and before you know it you are spending $20 and returning $100.
Of course these are just example numbers as each business is different.
The only problem here, aside from being able to hang on long enough financially, is time. Things don’t happen overnight because remember most businesses typically deal with the same common denominator and that is people.
It takes time to allow enough people to see your ads, to click through to your landing page, and to ultimately take action.
Often times companies come to us thinking we have the ‘magic’ button that will somehow put their campaign into serious profit mode, but they want it done in days instead of the weeks or even months that it sometimes takes.
Almost every campaign, if you have a viable product, can be dialed in to be profitable but only if you give it enough time.
There are many elements to a successful campaign typically that all have to be working together for maximum efficiency and profit.
Even if you have a campaign working, there are always ways to improve the results of that campaign through testing.
The example we give is a company that is coming on to have us improve their already successful results… If you could increase our output 25% you would be our best friend. They are already successful, but know that through strategic testing they can be better and more profitable and looking at their sales process we have already discovered several areas that will increase engagement and ultimately sales all the while increasing the efficiency of their ad spend.
When talking about time… it is the same for a split testing plan.
Often we are anxious in wanting the end result instead of giving the test enough time to work its course.
Not doing so could actually have a negative result.
Example: You setup an A/B test that is testing some images on a landing page.
A. Control
B. New Image
After about 1000 clicks you see a handful of conversions and the new image quickly jumps out into the lead winning by 25%.
Some people would say great we got a winner, immediately making the new image the new control.
There is however ONE BIG problem. Yep you guessed it, TIME!
They didn’t allow the test to run out to be statistically significant. They only had a few conversions on each variation which simply isn’t enough data. You need to typically look for 25 conversions on each variation before you even start looking further.
An example of where this happened.
Running a client campaign we were testing a video on the checkout page basically telling people what to do, how to contact support etc…
On day one the new video was showing an increase of more than 33%. But can you guess what happened?
By the end of day two that video started to slip and was now losing by more than 20%.
If we would have turned off the test and determined the video to be a winner, we would have potentially lost more than 20% of our conversions, thinking we were improving things by more than 33%.
See what I mean?
Time!
You have to give your marketing campaigns enough time to truly see the results you are looking for.