We work with businesses all the time who are making their first real effort at digital marketing. An important part of our initial process is a conversation about what to expect from this vital investment of time and money. It’s normal to want immediate and booming results: seeing your business at the top of Google search results, hundreds of new customers banging at the door begging for your product or service, and social media followers that would make any influencer jealous. But the only immediate thing these types of expectations will give you is the sinking feeling that “marketing doesn’t work,” even as it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. One of the first steps toward seeing great results from marketing is setting realistic expectations!

The Slow Burn of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key tool in digital marketing. It is one of the most effective ways we have of growing your business online. But SEO is not a quick fix! It can take weeks and often even months for pages to be crawled and indexed by Google, and the rise in search ranking results will be gradual. A common expectation (and promise from unscrupulous marketing companies!) is that you will be on page one of Google in a matter of days. The realistic expectation is one of incrementalism: steady improvement in traffic and customer conversion that increases and compounds over time. SEO is a long-haul strategy that pays off in huge dividends when given the time it needs.

Don’t Get Stuck in Traffic

More traffic and more clicks does not necessarily equal more customers. Clients sometimes feel that if they can just get more traffic to their site, the sales will start ballooning. The truth of the matter is not all traffic is good traffic! Scoring ten visitors who are a good fit for what you offer is better than a hundred who glance at your page, decide they don’t need your offerings, and bounce. In marketing, we aren’t pursuing sheer volume, we’re after quality volume; that is, visitors who will convert to active customers. The goal isn’t just a large number of visits to your site; it’s increasing the number who book your services or buy your product.

Get Engaged

Engagement is where you build trust with your customers. Social media, email newsletters, and reviews are all ways in which you can nurture your relationship with your customers. It’s fun to imagine that your TikTok reel will go viral or your inbox will be flooded after a clever newsletter, but that’s not how normal engagement works. Engagement improves when customers feel that you are trustworthy and genuine. They want to feel like they know your business and what it stands for. Working with real stories, honest insights and actual images of your business, team and products all give customers something concrete and meaningful to grab onto.

As a side note, on the matter of using authentic material whenever possible, see our blog “Keeping It Real” on the importance of using real photos instead of stock or AI images!

Invest Your Marketing Budget Wisely

Some clients expect SEO and newsletters to give the immediate kinds of returns they might see from a well-run paid ad campaign. This is a false equivalency, though. Paid ads can quickly generate click and visits, but these results end as soon as the budget for the campaign runs out. An unrealistic expectation is that all the marketing channels in which we work will give positive results with the same speed. The returns from SEO and good customer engagement are not as fast, but they keep generating long after the budget spent on them has expired. Marketing is like wise financial investment: some of the budget goes toward immediate results with quick wins, while a larger part goes to slow and steady returns that will build the long-term foundation of your customer base.

Why False Expectations Hurt

So why is this tempering of expectations important enough for a blog and to be a part of how we doo things? Unrealistic expectations don’t just cause disappointment; they have a number of other negative impacts as well. If a business isn’t prepared for the time it takes an effective SEO and engagement campaign to show results, they might be more inclined to lean into paid ads for quick results. But those quick results will be short-lived, and at the end of the day that budget can be better spent giving your business a thriving audience that will continue to give you their loyalty and patronage. When you understand the multi-pronged approach of marketing, you’re better able to measure its success and continue to invest in it with confidence and the assurance that you are establishing your business for future success. This is part of how we avoid the “marketing doesn’t work” fallacy and build sustainable growth.