Why Good Marketing Takes Time

In Marketing, Michigan Creative by Melissa Meschke

Many people expect marketing companies to work absolute marketing magic in a very short amount of time.

“I started paying for SEO a week ago. How come my business hasn’t reached page 1 of search results yet?”

“You started managing my Facebook page a few weeks ago. How come I’ve gained so little likes?”

“You made a YouTube video and posted it 5 days ago. How come it hasn’t gone viral yet?”

“I’ve been paying for your marketing services. How come I haven’t seen more sales?”

Of course these are all valid questions and life for marketers would be wonderful if things really did work that way! But unfortunately, life and marketing results aren’t that easy.

Good marketing takes a good amount of time for many reasons.

Let’s take a minute to talk about what marketing does for your business. Marketing creates sales. Marketing builds brand recognition and helps to establish your brand. Marketing helps put your name out there. The whole point of doing things like social media, YouTube videos, and airing ads is to build your brand and help your company become a household name. Let’s take the Lansing company, Michigan Plumbing, for example. I bet at least 7 out of 10 people reading this that live in the Lansing area could sing me the jingle and probably 5 out of 10 could describe their logo to me. Why is this? They market across multiple platforms and spend a lot of time and money doing so. Have I personally used their services? Do I really know what all of their services include? No, but I somehow know who they are and if I ever needed a service related to plumbing, their name certainly is on my call list. (Along with Michigan Creative‘s client, EB Companies, of course!)

Processes like going viral and getting to page 1 of Google results take time for different reasons. Most of these being the unspoken and unwritten rules of the internet. It takes a little bit of luck, a little bit of money, and a whole lot of patience for these kinds of things to happen. It’s all about using great keywords in the tags of your YouTube videos and picking the right key words for SEO. Then you must wait for them to effectively drive traffic.

One of the most difficult things to explain is that good marketing may not result in immediate sales. Of course things like promoting an event or advertising a discount can, but that’s obviously not all of your marketing. (If it is, it shouldn’t be) Anyway, going back to a point a made above about building and establishing your brand, that’s really what good marketing does. Good marketing doesn’t just provide you with a temporary boost in sales; it works to secure a long-term increase in sales to really help your bottom line. Isn’t that something every business owner would like?

So my message to you is to not give up on your marketing company! Truly great marketing results takes time (okay, and a little bit of money) and patience is a must. Long term marketing plans are the best for your business and for many marketing companies, that is what they want to provide for you!

Until next time,

~Melissa