However familiar this topic may be to all of us, I think it deserves a closer look, and a chance to break the illusion of marketing magic and instant solutions.

I’m talking about business owners who are ready to invest in their marketing. People who see the value of advertising, know it is the way to reach their target audience, have an idea of how they want to present themselves online and see how successful companies in their industry do it. So they set aside a budget and take action. And yet...

I often come across situations where the problem rarely lies in the willingness to invest. It lies in expectations that are not realistic, because too little is known about how advertising works and the maths behind it.

I do not expect an owner with their hands full, from finance and procurement to sales and hiring, to follow marketing every day. That is what a marketing team is for. But decisions about marketing investment are often made on the basis of sales-driven webinars, quick tips from artificial intelligence tools and other instant fixes. That only scratches the surface, and a decision meant to lead to a goal rather than down the wrong path needs to rest on solid information.

That is why I set out to find the research, from the logic behind advertising platforms, to how people make buying decisions, to the differences between industries.

Let’s start with the investment itself. You have paid for a campaign and you want it to pay off, in other words, to bring in leads. Everything is ready: the copy, the visuals, the call to action. It all looks great, and the campaign goes live. Time passes, no leads. The campaign gets optimised, more time passes, and still no leads, or just the odd one, and an irrelevant one at that. The conclusion comes quickly: the campaign isn’t working, switch it off, no point throwing money away. I’ll hire someone else, try another platform, with a smaller budget this time. I have no room to lose money on marketing, I need new clients.

If this sounds familiar, here is the short answer before we take it step by step. A campaign introduces you to people who are not looking for you yet. Most of them are not buying today, and those who will buy make their decision long before they get in touch. That is why a campaign has to go through stages, each stage needs its own goal, and a lead is not always the right goal.

When you pay for a campaign, you buy access to people, not their decision

An ad budget buys impressions. Your message reaches the people you chose, but the budget cannot buy the moment a person is ready to make a decision.

That moment depends on the buyer, not on you. A company does not change suppliers because it saw an ad, but when a contract expires, a problem arises or management approves a project. Until then, your ad is just one of the names it has seen.

That is why the expectation “I’ve paid, now I want leads” is understandable, but it rests on the wrong assumption: that everyone the campaign reaches is already ready to buy and just needs an invitation. They are not.

Most of your audience is not buying today

Imagine all the companies that could one day become your customers. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that at any given time only around 5% of B2B companies are in the market, actually looking for what you sell. The other 95% will buy, just not now. The LinkedIn B2B Institute later made this observation known as the 95:5 rule.

So those other 95% are not lost customers. Their contract with an existing supplier is still running, the budget is planned for next year, or the problem has not yet become urgent. Companies do not change suppliers, software or partners every month, but once every few years.

The second part of the picture matters even more. Buyers do most of the work on their own, before they contact anyone. A 2025 study by 6sense, covering almost 4,000 B2B buyers, found that buyers first reach out to a seller only once they are 61% of the way through the buying process. By then they have already researched the options, compared companies and drawn up a shortlist. As many as 94% already know who they want in first place before the first conversation, and in 77% of cases they end up buying from that very company. The whole process takes about 10 months on average.

What does this mean for your campaign? A campaign aimed only at “leads now” targets those 5% and ignores the 95% who will buy next year and who draw up their shortlist before they call anyone. If they do not know you by then, you will not be on that list. That is why the awareness stage is not a matter of taste or creativity, but the maths of the buying cycle. Reach and brand awareness campaigns exist for a reason. They need to run, be tested and be optimised, because they are what builds the demand you will later be able to capture.

The funnel is not theory, it is the order in which people get to know you

The marketing funnel describes the journey from the moment someone first hears about you to the moment they become a customer. In practice, campaigns follow that journey, and each stage has a different job.

The last column matters most. People who have watched your video or visited your website are no longer a cold audience. We build audiences for the next campaign from them, and only once that audience is large enough and warm enough does it make sense to ask for contact details. That is how campaigns build on one another, until lead generation becomes the logical next step.

Why a lead is not always the right campaign goal

Just as every campaign has a clear goal, so must the owner. But the business goal and the campaign goal are not the same. The business goal is a contract, while the goal of the first campaign may be for the right audience to remember you.

There is a technical reason for this too. Advertising platforms learn from signals. Every time someone does what you set as the goal, the system learns who to show the ad to next. When signals are scarce, the system has nothing to learn from.

Meta states that an ad set usually exits the learning phase after about 50 results in the week following its last significant edit. Until then, results are less stable and the cost per result is usually higher. For automated bidding, Google says a campaign needs one to two conversion cycles to stabilise. A conversion cycle is the time between a click and an enquiry. Google then recommends evaluating results over at least two weeks or two cycles, whichever is longer, and over a period with at least 30 conversions. In B2B sales, where several weeks can pass between a click and an enquiry, a campaign can only be judged fairly after several weeks. LinkedIn, for its part, does not start serving a campaign to a retargeting audience until that audience reaches at least 300 people.

Now imagine a company selling an expensive B2B service, with a moderate budget, whose campaign goal is a completed form. Fifty forms a week is not realistic for them. The system stays in the learning phase, Meta flags it as “Learning limited”, the cost per result goes up, and the owner concludes that the campaign is not working. In fact, the campaign never stood a chance, because from day one it was asking people who did not know the company for the rarest and most expensive action.

Then there is quality. A contact left in two clicks can just as easily be left without real intent. When the only goal is the number of leads, you often get lots of contacts that mean nothing, and sales waste time on people who never planned to buy. Fewer contacts from people who know who you are are worth more than many contacts from people who simply clicked.

Google Search is different, because users say exactly what they need. Someone who types in a specific service and price is already near the bottom of the funnel, and a contact can come quickly. But these are exactly the 5% who are already in the market, and they will only get in touch if they already know you or if you are ahead of the competition at that moment. So the speed of lead generation depends on where the audience is in the funnel when you meet them.

The market and the audience are not what they were a few years ago

You have probably noticed TikTok-style behaviour spreading to more and more platforms. Lots of video, short formats and very little time spent on any single post.

Professor Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, has spent years measuring how long people keep their attention on one screen before switching to something else. In her first study, in 2003, it was two and a half minutes. Around 2012 it was 75 seconds, and in studies from 2016 to 2020 the average fell to 47 seconds. In less than two decades, attention on a single screen has become more than three times shorter.

The change is visible on professional networks too. In early 2025, LinkedIn announced that video uploads had grown by 36% year on year.

The good news is that people are not against advertising. Kantar’s 2025 research, covering more than 21,000 consumers in 30 countries, shows that attitudes towards advertising have been improving steadily since 2020, and that 57% of people now feel positive about ads. People accept ads that give them something. They do not accept ads that say nothing to them.

For owners, this means the following: attention that used to come easily now has to be earned, and that takes more time and more encounters with the same person. That is exactly the job of the funnel stages.

People trust people, not logos

I have to stress one more thing, especially now that ads are being churned out with the help of artificial intelligence. The same Kantar research shows that 70% of marketers already use such tools in their work, and the market is full of content that sounds the same.

That is why approach is everything. Faceless campaigns run from company pages, with generic content, struggle to stop the scroll, and this is especially visible on LinkedIn. Stand out from the mass of such posts. Give your ad a human touch, speak to people personally, earn their trust and make them feel understood. For a cold audience that does not know you yet, this is the shortest path to being remembered.

Same rule, different maths across industries

Funnel logic applies everywhere, but the pace and the cost are not the same.

Budget is a separate topic and depends heavily on the platform you advertise on, the country you target and the audience you want to reach. LinkedIn, for example, explains that ads are sold through an auction, where you compete with other advertisers who want to reach the same audience, and that the cost depends on your bid and on how much in demand the target audience is. Directors and senior managers are an audience almost every B2B advertiser wants, so reaching them is, as a rule, more expensive.

How long should you really wait

There is no precise number of weeks, because it depends on the industry, the budget and where the audience is in the funnel. But there are reference points.

For the first few weeks the campaign is learning, and no conclusions should be drawn. The awareness stage is judged by whether the campaign reached the right audience and whether that audience responded, not by the number of leads.

The road to a buying decision is long, and getting longer. Dreamdata, a Danish company that tracks B2B buyer journeys, reports in 2026 that the typical B2B buyer journey to purchase has grown from 211 to 272 days. Today that journey includes 88 touchpoints with a company and ten people involved in the decision, and buyers spend around 220 days researching on their own before they even enter the sales process.

The effects of advertising on sales also build over months. Les Binet and Peter Field, analysing the database of the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which has collected documented campaign results for decades, showed that only after six months do the long-term effects of advertising start to influence sales more than the short-term ones. In their report for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, they therefore recommend splitting a B2B budget roughly half and half between brand building and sales activation.

Patience is not passive waiting

Let’s go back to the owner from the beginning. The campaign was switched off after a few weeks, the money moved to another platform or another agency, and everything starts again from scratch. The new campaign has to learn all over again, the audiences built by the previous one go unused, and people who had just started to recognise the company stop seeing it.

The most expensive part of that story is not the campaign that failed to bring in a lead, but the fact that it was stopped before it could do the job it was launched for.

That is why patience in marketing is not passive waiting. What matters is a clear plan before the first euro is invested: what each stage should achieve, how you will know it has worked and when you will decide on the next step. With that plan, you do not switch off a campaign that is doing its job, and you do not wait forever for one that is not. This is why it matters to understand the logic of continuous, stage by stage advertising, because that is how trust and loyalty among your target audience are built over the long term.

How we work

At EMESKA, we build that plan together with you, before the campaign launches. We do not start by asking how many leads you want, but by looking at where your audience is today and how long the road to a buying decision takes in your industry. Each stage gets its own goal, measure of success and review date, so at any moment you know what the campaign should be doing and whether it is doing it.

If your campaign is going through those quiet weeks right now, or you are only planning to start, let’s talk about your goals before you make a decision.

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