Fast results in marketing are bought, not found

Why can't a marketer guarantee a result?

A marketer cannot guarantee a result because most of what decides it happens after marketing has done its part. Say the right buyer arrives, through whichever channel. Does the sales process convert them? Is the delivery good? If they buy and the delivery goes wrong, there can be refunds, disputes, even lawsuits, and posts on social media that damage the company's name and cost it the sales that would have come next. I cannot guarantee a number for a business I have not yet worked inside.

Marketing can help save a business, and it can help grow one. It is not the only thing that does either. Some of what saves a business we would call marketing, and some we would not.

What I can promise is narrower. I can help a business learn more about its customers, and improve the process that brings in potential customers and converts them. That can always be improved. If I cannot improve what a client already has, I refund what they paid. That is the whole promise, and it has no number in it.

What does a fast result actually cost?

A fast result costs volume. Founders who want results inside a few weeks or a couple of months often say some version of the same sentence to me: "let's do growth hacking". In practice that means testing an enormous amount, 100, 200, 500 variations of several things at once, until a few of them work well enough to multiply.

Volume is necessary because most tests lose, even where testing is a discipline. Ron Kohavi, then head of the Analysis and Experimentation team at Microsoft, and Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2017: "At Google and Bing, only about 10% to 20% of experiments generate positive results." Across Microsoft as a whole, they put it at roughly one third of ideas tested improving the metric they were designed to improve, one third showing no significant change, and one third hurting it.

In the same article, they wrote that Microsoft, Amazon, Booking.com, Facebook and Google each ran more than 10,000 such experiments a year. Kohavi and his co-authors have also written that success is "even harder to find in well-optimized domains like Bing and Google". My guess is that a younger business, with easier wins left, beats those rates. It still finds its winners only by running enough tests to have some.

I am doing this on my own work at the moment. I planned 500 spoken hooks for my Arabic short videos, across 20 recording sessions, and 200 finished versions exist so far. Most of them will not be the one that works. Which ones will is the thing I am paying to find out.

Reaching a real result in one, two or three months is possible. It means spending to get there faster. Not millions, but tens or hundreds of thousands. What that money buys is learning: enough to decide whether the investment is worth it and what the return would be: should I put more money into this, or do something else? Run hundreds or thousands of variations and failing becomes very unlikely, because the sheer number of them teaches you hundreds, then thousands, of things about your customer.

Why does asking for the sale straight away cost more?

Asking for the sale straight away costs more because most of the people who see an ad are not ready to buy. When businesses advertise, they usually want the call to action to be "buy now". In the ideal case, someone sees the ad, likes you a great deal, and buys. That is what we all want. In reality there is a lot of convincing and figuring out in between: calls, several videos, an outreach system.

Most buyers are not in the market on the day they see the ad. John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, writing for LinkedIn's B2B Institute in 2021, estimated that for something a company buys about once every five years, such as its main bank or law firm, the share of business buyers in the market is "something like 5% in a quarter", or "put another way, 95% aren't in the market." The five years is his one assumption, and he cites no source for it. He calls the result a heuristic, and it is arithmetic rather than a measurement. Shorten the buying cycle and the share rises: his own example is about 13% a quarter for something bought every two years. Either way, an ad that only says "buy now" is written for the minority who happen to be ready.

So ask people to buy immediately, and most of them do not. My rough expectation is a conversion rate of something like 1 to 3% when you ask for the purchase straight away. Stretch the process instead. Let them sign up for a newsletter, a lead magnet, a course or a webinar first, and the share who go on to buy can be much higher, something like 10 or 20%, because you have invested in them by then.

What does thinking long term buy?

Thinking long term buys a system, a way of making money continuously instead of once. A known number of people enter it, and it costs a known amount to bring each of them in. They get value from it, through videos, newsletters, a webinar, events. The relationship builds. When they are ready to buy, there is a step where they can.

Run that for long enough and the numbers become knowable. How long and how much does it take to bring someone into the pool? How many of them buy, in general, and per month, per week, per day? Once you know those, you can start predicting:

• If I spend 10,000, I get this much.
• If I spend 100,000, I get this much.
• If I spend a million, I get this much.

That is a repeatable way of making money, which is what a business is. A business is not one thing that earned a million, or 10 million, or 100 million, after which nobody knows how to do it again. A business built on one campaign that worked once is a one-hit wonder with a payroll.

Research on advertising finds the same split between what is fast and what lasts. Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns from the IPA's effectiveness databank for The Long and the Short of It (2013). In Media in Focus (2017), they wrote that activation effects "tend to be big, immediate and direct", while "brand effects decay away more slowly, and so repeated exposures can cause the base level of sales to rise." On average, they found, effectiveness seemed to peak when around 60% of the communications budget went to brand building and around 40% to activation. In a 2019 report for LinkedIn's B2B Institute, built on fewer than 50 business-to-business cases, they put the B2B split nearer half and half, about 46% brand and 54% activation. Their data is entries to the IPA Effectiveness Awards, which leans towards campaigns that worked, a bias they call modest, and they say the right split varies by category.

Isn't the long term a luxury when sales are down this month?

For some businesses it is, and the objection deserves its strongest form. A founder whose sales fell this month does not have a year to build a system. If the money runs out in ninety days, a long-term plan is a wish, and nothing in this essay changes that. Marketing cannot save a business that runs out of cash first, and it cannot save one whose delivery is broken.

What the objection gets wrong is the choice it thinks it is making. Speed is available. It is paid for with volume and money, and what it buys, done properly, is the same equation the slow route builds: what a customer costs, and what one is worth. Every business that wants a repeatable result pays for that equation. It pays in money or in months.

I know what a quarter of nothing looks like from the inside. Before I started any of my companies, I freelanced marketing for a full year and made 8,000 riyals in total. Nobody knew I existed, I waited to be picked instead of reaching out, and I had nothing to show anyone. When I fixed it, a real profile and clear positioning first and then direct outreach, the first three months produced nothing except the habit of sending. Judged at ninety days, the fix had failed.

What is my own money doing right now?

My own money is running the same comparison, where I can see every riyal. From late September, I paid for two sets of Meta ads, shown in Saudi Arabia and written for business owners, at almost the same cost. One set asked people to book a one-to-one call with me. The other invited them to a one-to-many webinar.

Almost the same money went into each, and the first step people were willing to take was very different. I paused the first set.

A sign-up is not a sale, and neither column tells me yet what a customer costs. What it tells me is which first step a stranger will take for the money, and that is the first number in the equation. The rest of the equation comes from what those people do next.

A result you cannot repeat was luck. A system is how you stop guessing. When a founder asks me how fast marketing can work, the more useful question is the one underneath it: when this is over, will you know what to spend next?