The Six-Month Problem Every Marketing Team Faces

Marketing initiatives typically need six to nine months to show real returns. Most organizations give them three months before panicking.

“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” says Taylor Thomson, who leads finance and revenue operations at WITHIN. “If your leadership is saying, yeah, you’re going to invest a bunch of money right now and you’re not going to see anything on it for nine months, especially with things like that, really high value content and things that drive relationships in that way, you might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue until a year.”

This timing mismatch kills effective marketing before it can work. Leadership demands immediate ROI. Marketing resorts to tactics that produce quick metrics—lead capture forms, gated content, aggressive email campaigns—even when these approaches undermine long-term brand building.

Thomson advocates a radically different approach: create genuinely valuable content without demanding anything in return. No registration forms. No lead capture. WITHIN built The Marketing Pulse, which provides real-time data about social media CPMs and costs—completely free, no strings attached.

“The more of that that marketing teams can really do, where you don’t have to enter the sales funnel,” Thomson argues, “the better everybody’s going to be at their jobs because it’s just information sharing and knowledge sharing.”

The challenge is maintaining this approach when pressure builds around month six. Marketing needs to justify its budget. Sales wants more leads. The temptation to start gating content becomes overwhelming.

But organizations that resist eventually see returns that gated content can’t match: organic sharing, authentic recommendations, prospects who arrive already convinced of your expertise.

Thomson’s morning ritual illustrates the philosophy. He spends 15-20 minutes daily scanning 15 industry newsletters, extracting the most relevant insights for his team. This intelligence gathering doesn’t generate immediate revenue. It creates conditions for better conversations when his business development team does engage prospects.

The same logic applies to thought leadership and content marketing. You’re not creating blog posts to generate form fills. You’re building credibility that pays dividends over extended time horizons. Measure success accordingly.

Finance leaders who understand this can protect marketing from short-term pressure. Those who don’t will keep demanding quarterly ROI from activities whose benefits accrue over years.