The Campaign Just Launched…So Why Are We Panicking?

It’s the start of a new fiscal year, and a lot of marketing teams are either renewing with their agency or kicking off something new. Budgets are fresh, campaigns are being built, and the pressure to perform is already creeping in.

I’ve been there. Everyone’s excited to launch, but before the ads are even live, someone’s asking you, “How soon will we see leads?”

Results take time. And if you’re not setting that expectation early, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of unnecessary stress.

The Myth of Instant ROI

"So… are we seeing leads yet?"

It’s a fair question. Marketing is a big investment, and people want to know it’s working. But the reality is, most campaigns need more time than we think. Even in digital, where everything feels fast and trackable, results don’t show up overnight. There's a setup. There’s learning. There’s optimizing. And yes, sometimes there’s silence before anything meaningful happens.

In my experience, whether working with clients or leading in-house teams, the toughest part isn’t launching the campaign. It’s managing expectations in the quiet that comes after. That’s where trust is tested.

Especially in higher ed, where decision cycles stretch for months and prospective students take their time, quick wins are rare. That doesn’t mean your marketing isn’t working. It means it’s unfolding the way it’s supposed to.

What’s Realistic by Channel

I wish I could give a neat timeline for every marketing tactic. But the truth is, there’s no hard and fast rule. Timelines vary based on budget, creative, brand equity, competition, internal operations, among other variables. That said, there are general patterns we see across channels. Understanding them helps align expectations and gives you a realistic framework to plan around.

SEO: 6–12 Months (and Worth Every Bit of It)

SEO is not a silver bullet. It’s a long game and you have to be in it. Think of it like planting seeds. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits. But if you never plant, you’ll always be stuck relying on paid media to get visibility.

When I was in-house, I had to constantly remind leadership that SEO wouldn’t deliver instant lead flow. It’s about building authority, improving content, fixing technical gaps, and staying consistent quarter after quarter. The upside? Once you’re ranking, those pages keep working for you, without additional spend.

Adrienne Ritchie, Senior Strategist of Data and Analytics at OHO, put it perfectly:

"We typically start seeing meaningful movement around the 4-month mark, especially when technical fixes and content improvements are implemented early. But the best-performing SEO programs treat optimization as iterative. Each quarter builds on the last, and the real compounding returns like qualified traffic, leads, and visibility in AI-powered results kick in around months 6 to 12. It’s not a waiting game. It’s a momentum game."

And in 2025, that momentum matters more than ever. With AI and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) changing how users interact with results, the long-term value of SEO has only increased. Your content needs to be optimized, not just for rankings, but for visibility in answers. If you’re not showing up where the AI is pulling from, you’re invisible to a growing segment of prospective students.

Paid Search & Social: Fast Signals, Long-Term Gains

Paid channels give you some of the clearest and most actionable feedback loops. You’ll usually start to see early indicators like click-through rates, cost per lead, and engagement within 30 to 90 days. These are high-intent users, especially in paid search, because they’re actively looking for programs or outcomes like the ones you offer.

That said, just because the data starts coming in quickly doesn’t mean you’ve hit peak performance. Paid campaigns almost always improve over time. The more data you have, the smarter your targeting and optimization get, especially when you’re using first-party data to track results beyond the initial lead and feed that insight back into campaign strategy.

Chris Kostecki, one of our senior campaign managers, explains it like this:

“At OHO, we often start with paid search campaigns since we can get into market fairly quickly, and we can start building future audiences off high-intent demand from the searches we target. While awareness efforts may deliver more scale more quickly, we usually do not see the same level of intent behind those audiences until we hone in with more specific audience models. Starting with search allows us to move quickly without sacrificing quality.”

That long-game approach pays off. Over time, we often see our clients’ cost per lead drop as we learn more about how their audiences search, which competitors show up alongside them, and which messages drive the right kind of traffic. With consistent investment and smart iteration, these campaigns only get stronger.

Lead Nurturing: Precision Matters More Than Speed

If you’re starting with a cold list or building one from scratch, lead nurturing takes time. But here’s the key: alignment is everything. Your marketing team and enrollment counselors need to be speaking the same language. Otherwise, you’re confusing prospects, not converting them.

When we built out a nurture series, we didn’t stop at content creation. We tracked what got clicked, when prospects took action, and just as important, what triggered the workflows to pause or stop. Over time, those insights helped us refine the cadence and content for better conversion rates. Nurture strategy should never be “set it and forget it.”

Brand Campaigns: The Intangibles That Fuel Everything Else

Brand awareness is notoriously hard to measure in the short term, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. The impact often shows up in rising branded search volume, stronger engagement on social, and improved conversion rates over time.

You won’t see “brand campaign = application” in your CRM. But we consistently see that institutions investing in brand, especially those entering competitive markets, build trust faster and drive downstream performance across every other tactic.

How to Set Stakeholder Expectations

One of the most valuable things a marketing leader can do, internally or in partnership with an agency, is help stakeholders understand how results happen, not just when they’ll show up. It’s not just about setting realistic timelines. It’s about aligning everyone around the process.

Here are a few approaches I’ve used, and still use, to keep expectations grounded and focused on progress rather than panic.

1. Frame Success in Phases

Marketing isn’t a faucet you turn on. It’s a system that has to be built, tested, and optimized. I often frame it in three phases:

• Crawl – Get the tracking in place, launch the campaigns, and gather baseline data.
• Walk – Analyze what’s working and what’s not, refine audiences and the creative.
• Run – Scale the most effective tactics, introduce automation, and invest with confidence.

This simple model helps stakeholders understand that early results aren’t the final outcome. They’re part of a learning process.

2. Look at Leading Indicators, Not Just Conversions

Conversions are the ultimate goal, but they take time, especially in higher ed. In the meantime, leading indicators tell us if we’re heading in the right direction:

• Are we reaching the right audiences?
• Are people engaging with the landing pages?
• Are inquiry forms being viewed or partially completed?
• Are prospects spending time on key program pages?

These micro-conversions may not show up in your CRM right away, but they’re critical steps in the journey. And they can help calm nerves while the pipeline matures.

3. Explain Attribution — Over and Over Again

One of the hardest conversations I’ve had, time and time again, is around attribution. Not every click results in a lead, and not every channel gets the credit it deserves,especially if you’re using a last-click model.

I remember one budget cycle when I was leading digital strategy, and my boss was pressuring me to kill our Facebook ad spend because “it wasn’t driving leads.” But I knew it was playing a role in the funnel. People were seeing our ads, engaging with content, and converting later through other channels. I just didn’t have the tools at the time to prove it.

Now, we help our clients set up GA4 to track those micro-moments: the video views, the scroll depth, the click paths. And what we find, over and over again, is that it often takes multiple touches across multiple channels before someone converts. Killing one channel too early because it doesn’t “look like it’s working” can be a costly mistake.

The Cost of Chasing Quick Wins

I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. Everyone starts to get antsy for leads, so budgets get pulled from campaigns that just needed a little more time. Or teams jump from tactic to tactic hoping something sticks. Before long, the strategy is all over the place with disconnected campaigns, mixed messages, and no clear sense of what’s actually working.

To be fair, not everything in marketing needs months to show impact. There are moments where short, flighted campaigns. like promoting an info session, webinar, or deadline, can deliver quick wins. But they work best when they’re layered onto a solid strategy. They are not a fix-all. They are an accelerator that only works if the engine is already running.

Tess MacCurdy, one of our digital marketing strategists, explains it well:

"One of the most important parts of implementing a new strategy is maintaining confidence in the approach while campaigns are settling. The strongest performance comes from steady learning and iteration, not premature adjustments. That’s why we typically give paid digital campaigns a full 90 days in market before making major changes. It allows us to gather meaningful data to optimize effectively. When we let the data lead, we make smarter decisions and build trust in the process.”

That trust is what makes the difference. When you chase quick wins, you end up spending more and learning less. But when you give your strategy room to work and stay steady through the quiet phase, you create space for the kind of results that actually last.

The bottom line? You can’t build sustainable growth by chasing quick wins alone. But when you’ve got a smart strategy, realistic timelines, and the right team behind it, you’ll get there. And yes, along the way, you’ll get some wins. But the real results come when you commit to the long game.