Why Your Marketing Isn't Broken (You Just Haven't Waited Long Enough)

If you've ever tried a marketing strategy for a few weeks, decided it wasn't working, and switched to something completely different—only to do the same thing again a month later—this episode is going to be a little uncomfortable. In the best possible way.

Here's what nobody tells you when they're selling you on the latest marketing tactic: results take time. Real time. Not six weeks. Not ninety days. Often six to twelve months before a strategy is even worth properly evaluating. And in a world of instant everything, most business owners simply aren't willing to wait long enough to find out if what they're doing actually works.

So they flip-flop. They try Instagram, then abandon it for LinkedIn, then pivot to email, then hear about something new in a Facebook group and start over again. They're not failing at marketing—they're just never giving any single strategy long enough to compound into something real.

Marketing isn't broken. You just haven't waited long enough. This episode shows you how to stay the course.

Transcript

Hey. Welcome to the New School of Marketing podcast. I'm Bianca McKenzie and this is the place where we break down marketing strategies that actually work without the overwhelm.

Before we dive in, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I live and work on, the palawa people of lutruwita. I pay my respects to elders past and present and acknowledge the deep connection they have to this land, culture and community.

Now let's dive in and make marketing work for you.

If you've ever tried a marketing strategy for a few weeks, decided it wasn't working, and switched to something completely different, only to do the same thing again a month later, then this episode is going to be a little uncomfortable in the best possible way.

Today we're talking about one of the most common reasons why marketing fails.

Not because the strategy was wrong, but because the person doing it ran out of patience before the results arrived.

Because here's the truth nobody wants to hear.

Marketing takes time.

Real time.

And in a world of instant everything, most people simply are not willing to wait long enough to find out if what they're doing actually works.

I want to start by talking about the world we're marketing in, because context really matters here.

We live in an era of instant gratification. Same day delivery, streaming, anything you want in seconds.

News as it happens.

And social media has made our expectations even more warped.

Because what we see on our news feeds is always the highlight reel.

Someone you know announces their 50k launch and it looks like it happened overnight.

A business account seems to explode from 500 to 50,000 followers in no time. A course creator announces their six figure year and it feels like it came out of nowhere.

But here's what you're not seeing.

You're not seeing the two years of consistent content before that big launch.

You're not seeing the three years of showing up before the follower count actually got impressive.

You're not seeing the four years of slowly, quietly building trust before the income became something worth announcing.

Social media shows you the harvest.

It never, ever shows you the planting, the watering, the waiting, and the weeding that came before it.

And because we only ever see the harvest, we've developed completely unrealistic expectations about how quickly marketing should produce results.

We expect to plant a seed on Monday and have crops by Friday.

And when that doesn't happen, we assume that the seeds are bad, not that we just haven't waited long enough.

I think one of the reasons people give up too soon is that they don't understand what's actually happening in the background when they are marketing and not yet seeing results.

So let me explain it, because understanding why it takes time makes the waiting a lot more bearable.

The biggest one is trust.

People don't buy from strangers.

They buy from people they know like and trust.

And trust is not built through a single post or a single email or a single ad.

It's built through repeated exposure over time.

Every time someone sees your content, reads your email, hears your name mentioned somewhere, their trust in you increases just a little bit. Not like dramatically, just a little bit.

You might need 10, 15, even more touch points before someone genuinely considers buying from you.

And those touch points, they need to happen over weeks and months, not days.

Then there's the compounding effect.

And this one is the one I really want you to understand.

Marketing compounds just like interest on an investment.

But compounding only works if you don't withdraw early.

Your first month of content reaches a small audience.

Your second month of content reaches a slightly bigger one.

By month six, your earlier content is still out there working for you.

New people are finding you through that content, and your current content is reaching more people than it ever did in month one.

But, and this is so important, if you stop at month two and restart at month five,

you don't pick up where you left off. You start the compounding process over from, like, close to zero. Not like zero, but close to zero.

And every time you do that, and if you're doing any kind of content that gets indexed by search engines, like, you know, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, the timeline is even longer. We're talking like six to 12 months before you meaningfully start showing up search results.

Not like six weeks.

I'm talking six months, minimum. That's just how it works.

And no amount of impatience is going to change it.

Now, let me describe a pattern that I see constantly, because I think a lot of you are going to recognize yourselves in this one.

So you decide to focus on, let's say, Instagram.

You're posting consistently, you're learning, you're feeling good about it.

Month two rolls around and the results are not obvious yet, but you're still going to.

Then you sit in on a webinar and someone convinces you that LinkedIn is where the real business happens.

So you abandon Instagram. You pivot to LinkedIn.

A month into LinkedIn, it feels slow.

And then a podcast episode you listen to on the way to, you know, school drop off tells you that email marketing is the only thing that actually matters. So you start building an email list.

Then someone in a Facebook group that you know that you're in swears that a particular platform changed their business overnight. And before you know it, you've downloaded yet another app.

By month four, you're on four platforms, doing none of them well, completely exhausted and genuinely confused about why nothing is working.

Here's what actually happened.

You never gave any single strategy enough time to produce results.

You kept pulling up, you know, the seedlings to check if the roots were growing. And every time you pulled it up, you killed it.

And I call this flip flopping between tactics. And it's one of the most common reasons marketing never gains momentum.

Not because the strategies were wrong, not because the platforms don't work, but because nothing was ever allowed to run long enough to find out.

And look, I understand why this happens. I really do.

Because it's not just impatience. There are really understandable reasons why we flip flop.

The discomfort of early marketing. It feels an awful lot like failure.

Like when you're posting into what feels like a void. When engagement is modest and your growth is slow, that silence, it's uncomfortable.

It feels like a sign that something's wrong.

So we assume the strategy isn't working and we try something else. But that discomfort isn't failure.

It's just the normal experience of doing something that hasn't built momentum yet.

There's also the endless noise of marketing advice.

Every webinar, podcast, and online community, they're all telling you about something different that's working for someone else.

And because there are so many options, it feels almost irresponsible not to explore them.

You know, what if this other strategy is the one? What if you're missing the opportunity by saying, staying the course? And honestly, deep down, a lot of us are secretly hoping to find a strategy that bypasses the waiting.

You know, the tactic that produces results in days rather than months.

So when something doesn't work fast enough, we move on.

Not because it genuinely wasn't working, but because it wasn't working on the timeline we wanted.

So let me give you some honest expectations here, because I think part of the problem is that nobody actually tells you how long things take.

With email marketing, you're typically looking at around Six months before it starts feeling like a real asset, where emails are regularly generating inquiries and sales.

Before that, you're building, you're learning, you're growing slowly. It doesn't mean it's not working. It means it's warming up.

And just as a side note, I think you should always have email marketing in your marketing mix.

Like, it's like your solid foundation with organic social media.

Six months of consistent effort is usually when you start seeing real momentum. Like six months, that's when you start seeing, you know, meaningful conversations, content being shared, people reaching out.

The first two to three months are mostly learning what resonates and building the habit.

With blogging and SEO, we're talking nine to 12 months at a minimum, before you see meaningful search traffic.

Some articles take like 18 months to rank. Well, that's not a bug in the system, it's just how search engines work.

With podcasting, you're typically 12 to 18 months before the real rewards start showing up.

Loyal listeners who've been with you long enough to trust you, opportunities coming your way, referrals from your audience.

Every single one of these channels requires like 6 to 12 months minimum, before you can genuinely evaluate whether it's working.

Not six to 12 weeks.

I'm talking months.

And I think that's the piece of information most people never actually receive, which is why six weeks, you know, they assume that they're failing when they're really right on schedule.

Now, I hear you, because I know the question that's coming.

How do you know when something genuinely isn't working versus when you just haven't given it enough time?

And this is a really fair question. And I'm not saying never change anything. I'm saying don't change before you've given it a genuine chance.

If you've been at something consistently for less than 90 days, it needs more time, not more strategy.

If you're getting some engagement, some slow growth, some early conversations, even if modest, it needs more time.

And if you're making the decision to change based on a feeling of impatience rather than an actual data, it definitely needs more time.

But if you've genuinely consistently executed something for six months or more and there's truly zero traction, not slow traction, but nothing, then it's worth looking more closely.

Or if your data is telling you something specific, like people are opening your emails but never clicking anything, that is a signal worth paying attention to. That's data, that's not impatience.

Again, email is one of those things that it's always outperforming in terms of return on investment with marketing.

So don't ditch it, but investigate what the data is telling you.

If people are never clicking on anything, maybe you actually need to change the way you write.

So the key difference is time plus data.

Don't change strategy because you're bored or frustrated, or because someone in an online group told you about something shinier.

Change strategy when actual data from a sufficient period of time tells you to.

So here's a simple rule I want you to take away from this episode. Give any marketing strategy a minimum of 90 days of consistent, genuine execution before you decide that it's not working.

Not like 90 days of dabbling. Not like 90 days of showing up when you feel like it.

90 days of actually doing what you committed to do as often as you committed to and tracking what happens and why. 90 days because it's long enough to see early kind of patterns emerge.

It removes the noise of those first few weeks where everything kind of feels uncertain.

It gives algorithms a little bit of time to understand who you are and who to show your content to. And it gives your audience enough time to see you repeatedly.

And it gives you enough data to make an informed decision rather than an emotional one.

At the end of 90 days, look at your numbers.

What has improved? What hasn't?

What is the actual data telling you? Not your feelings, not what someone else in the Facebook group is doing, but your data.

Then, and only then, make adjustments. And even then, change one thing at a time. I can't stress this enough. Change one thing at a time. If you change your platform, your content type, your posting schedule, and your offer all at once, you'll never know what actually made the difference.

So only change one thing at a time.

Now, patience sounds passive, but it's actually something you have to actively build into how you work. Because left to its own devices, your brain will always look for the shortcut, the new thing, the faster path.

One of the most practical things to do is shift what you measure.

Revenue is what's called a lagging indicator.

It takes a long time to show up, but email this growth, engagement, quality, follower growth, and the number of meaningful conversations that you're having are leading indicators.

They show you earlier that things are moving in the right direction even before sales start appearing.

If you're only measuring whether you've made sales, you're going to feel like nothing is working for a long time.

But if you're measuring whether your list grew by, you know, 30 people this month, whether your posts are getting more saved than they were you were last quarter, whether you're getting more DMs than you were like six months ago, suddenly you can see the progress that's happening underneath the surface before it becomes revenue.

And I also really encourage you to find some kind of accountability, a community, a coach, an accountability partner, something.

Because when you're tempted to abandon ship, having someone who knows your strategy and can tell you you're six weeks in, this is exactly where everyone feels like this.

That is honestly invaluable.

It's really hard to maintain patience in isolation when every piece of content you see seems to, you know, promise faster results.

I want to leave you with something that I come back to myself whenever I'm tempted to abandon something that hasn't produced results yet. Because, you know, I'm only human. I'm also impatient.

Farmers don't plant seeds and dig them up three weeks later to check if that they're growing.

They know because they understand how plants work.

They know that there's a process happening underground that they simply can't see.

The right conditions need to be in place.

The roots need to develop before anything breaks the surface.

And if they duck those seeds up every few weeks to check on them, they'd kill them every single time.

Your marketing is the same.

There is work happening underground that you can't see yet.

Trust is building, algorithms are learning who you are, people are noticing you and coming back.

Relationships are forming, roots are developing. But if you keep digging everything up because you can't see anything happening yet, you're going to kill it every time, and obviously not in a good way.

So plant your seeds, water them consistently, trust the process, and please, please stop digging them up.

So there you have it. Marketing takes time and more time than most people are willing to give it.

And the businesses that win, they're not the ones with the, you know, cleverest tactics. They're the ones with the most patience, the most consistency, and the discipline to stay the course when things feel slow.

I'm going to leave you with some actions for this week.

Be honest with yourself about whether you've been staying the course or flip flopping.

And if it's the latter, choose one strategy.

Commit to the 90 days of genuine, consistent execution, and don't let yourself change course before that time is up.

Write it down, make it real. Get that, you know, accountability person. And if you want, actually help staying the course, like, make that commitment with a community and monthly coaching to keep you consistent even when the impatience kicks in.

That's exactly what we do inside the marketing momentum membership.

I will pop the link in the show notes so you can look at it.

Just remember, marketing isn't broken. You just haven't waited long enough.

Thank you so much for tuning into the new school of marketing podcasts. Remember, the long game is the only game worth playing.

I'm Bianca McKenzie and I'll catch you next week. Until then, keep making marketing work for you.