Paid Media Might Not Deliver Short Term Results

“The sales team has some room on their calendars next week, what can we do to fill them up?”

This is a question I’ve received from clients a few times, and they don’t always love my answer.

For businesses who have higher priced products or services, chances are that it would be difficult to use paid media to find net new prospects, get them to book a meeting, and have them actually commit to a purchase all within a few days. This can be a business-first approach to marketing, which doesn’t always align with actual buyer behavior.

Sure, it would be possible to set up a Meta campaign with a lead form that can easily fill up calendar spots, but I’ve seen similar tactics result in full calendars that don’t result in any actual conversations. Optimizing for short-term meeting quantity can yield poor quality leads that don’t have any intention of purchasing.

My recommendation to clients is that it may be more effective to plan goals on at least a monthly cadence, if not quarterly. Trying to read and react on a week-by-week basis can cause quite a number of fire drills, and prevent the implementation of any strategies that might be designed for long-term growth.

Metrics like average time between lead creation and deal creation can be helpful to determine how far in advance “upper funnel” efforts should be adjusted in order to see the downstream impact. If a business isn’t collecting leads for educational/nurture purposes, then using engaged audience size as a proxy is a solid alternative.

For example, if podcast episodes are a large contributor of booked meetings for a business, but the marketing team knows that there will be a stretch of a few weeks with no episodes next quarter, it might be helpful to ramp up paid media now. That provides potential future buyers with plenty of time to engage with the brand and conduct the research they need to feel comfortable buying in a few week’s time.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.