If you’re leading a company that’s done little into a launching a marketing program, or scaling up an existing one, in my experience you better start showing some results within six months.

I’m not talking about campaign results like opens, likes, shares and retweets, but business results like an increase in leads, opportunities and sales. That’s what the people who control the purse strings are looking for.

And if they don’t have a lot of confidence in marketing to begin with, which is the case in many companies that haven’t been doing much of it,, they aren’t going to spend much money or give much time to see results.

And this is where my Bullseye Marketing Framework comes in handy since it priorities a number of programs that companies can inexpensively get business results from in just a few months.

Once you’ve shown business results and built confidence then you can get buy in for those longer-term, more expensive programs like social media and inbound marketing. Many VPs of marketing have said to me that a major selling job for them is getting the executive team to understand, and buy into, how long those and other campaigns may take to produce results.

That’s why you don’t want to start with those. Get some quick wins under your belt and you can move on to those longer term, always on programs later.