Marketing takes time. Brand builds slowly. SEO is a long game. Content compounds. Anyone promising you results in three weeks is selling something.
But that’s not usually the problem I run into.
The problem is the opposite. A campaign runs for six weeks, the numbers don’t look like much, and somebody wants to shut it down and try something else. Then that thing gets six weeks. And so on.
Nothing ever runs long enough to tell you anything. And “we tried that, it didn’t work” gets said about things that were never actually given a chance.
Both mistakes are real. Some things need more time. Some things should have been killed months ago. The trick is telling them apart, and most companies don’t have a way to do that.
Most of this gets messy because nobody defined success up front.
If you don’t say what you expect at 30 days and at 90, every result is a matter of opinion. The person who likes the campaign says it’s early. The person who doesn’t says it’s a waste. Neither of them is wrong, because nothing was defined.
So before it launches: what would we expect to see in a month if this is working, and what would we expect at three?
Those are two different answers.
The goal is qualified leads. That’s what you’re after.
But the KPIs that tell you whether you’re getting there don’t all show up at once. Engaged website visits, clicks, opens, replies, people landing on the right page and actually staying. Those move first. Qualified leads and closed revenue come later, especially on a long sales cycle.
So at 30 days you’re looking at the early ones. If those are moving and the leads haven’t landed yet, that’s usually timing. People are engaging, the audience is right, the rest hasn’t caught up.
If nothing is moving anywhere, that’s a different story. Nobody’s seeing it, nobody’s clicking. Another 60 days isn’t going to tell you something new.
Two very different situations, and they get treated like the same conversation.
This one comes up constantly and it’s worth checking first.
A lot of companies don’t have the tracking set up to know whether anything is working. No proper tagging, no UTMs, forms that don’t pass source data, a CRM that isn’t connected to anything. So the campaign might be doing fine and nobody can see it.
If you’re about to cut something, first make sure you’d be able to tell if it were working. Otherwise you’re not making a decision, you’re guessing with extra steps.
A few other things worth checking:
If any of those is a no, you don’t have a verdict. You have an unfinished test. Either run it properly or admit you’re not going to and stop.
It’s impatience. Almost always.
Somebody wants to see movement now. The quarter’s half over, the pipeline looks thin, and the campaign that’s been running for a month becomes the obvious thing to blame. So it gets pulled and something new gets started, which also won’t get enough time.
That’s how a company ends up with a graveyard of six-week experiments and a leadership team convinced that marketing doesn’t work for their business.
Marketing did not fail. It never got past the starting line.
The fix isn’t more patience in the abstract. It’s deciding what you expect and when, so the conversation is about the plan instead of about how anxious everybody is feeling in week five.
When it really is time to stop, do it properly.
Write down what you learned, even if it’s three sentences. Was it the idea, the execution, or the timing? Otherwise somebody proposes the same thing next year and nobody remembers why it didn’t work.
Move the money somewhere specific. Budget that gets freed up and not reassigned tends to quietly vanish, and the lesson everyone learns is that trying things costs you resources.
And tell whoever owned it directly, before they hear it from someone else.
Give it enough time to know. Not so much that you’re funding hope.
Decide up front what you’d expect to see. Know the difference between no leads yet and nothing moving at all. Make sure you can actually measure it before you judge it.
And when something genuinely needs to stop, stop it, and put the money somewhere it can do something.
Most companies don’t need more ideas. They need someone who can tell the difference between a slow start and a dead end. Let’s talk.
Depends on the channel and your sales cycle, but decide before launch. At 30 days look for movement in your early KPIs. At 90 you should be seeing early results or have a clear reason why not.
Fix your tracking before you make the call. A lot of campaigns get cut because nobody could see them, not because they failed.
You never find out what would have worked, and you build a track record of half-finished tests that makes everyone believe marketing doesn’t work for your business.
Someone who can see across all your marketing and doesn’t have a stake in one channel looking good. That’s rarely the person or vendor running the channel.
Founder, Tara Lilly & Co. · Fractional Marketing Leader
Tara Lilly is the founder of Tara Lilly & Co. and a fractional CMO for B2B companies. She leads strategy and brings a senior team of specialists who use AI to execute. Before starting the company, she spent 15+ years leading marketing teams across credit unions, agencies, and startups, including work on Volvo Trucks North America.
