How much time does it take for marketing to work? That is a common question I get from our customers. There is not one answer to that question. It depends upon what you are selling and the felt need for it presently.

When there is an urgency in the felt need, the marketing time is significantly shorter than when there is time to wait on a decision to buy or not. I went out to eat today for lunch. I examined my options based on restaurants in my vicinity, how long I had to wait to get my food, what was on their menu before I made a decision. I get hungry everyday at lunchtime, so I have a recurring felt need. It doesn’t take a lot of time or contemplation for me to make a decision. If I hear or see an ad for something that sounds good around lunchtime, I will go buy it. Other products and services don’t have the same felt need. For instance, if I were buying gutters for my house, I would take my time and do more research than I do with restaurants. That is, unless the gutters had just fallen off of my house and it was about to rain. In that case, my decision would come much quicker. Why? The felt need is urgent.

Can you build urgency into your marketing? Yes you can. When you create a limited time sale, you are setting a deadline to force a felt need for a bargain upon your customers. Does it work? Yes! Limited time discounts are great marketing techniques to shorten the sales cycle and make your marketing work faster.

Similar to urgency, another driver to shorten the time it takes marketing to work is scarcity. Whenever anything is in short supply, the felt need to buy it – and even horde it – goes up. Right now there are critical shortages of foods that are sold in glass jars because canning jars are in short supply. So are hot dogs, chlorine used to sanitize swimming pools from bacteria, new and used cars, lumber and a number of other building materials. (I was recently told that stealing lumber at construction sites has become a problem for homebuilders.) Shortages create panicked buying.

If you have an item that is in short supply, use your marketing to get the word out. There is something about the way our consumer brains work that make us want to buy something before they are all gone. Counting down to the last of your inventory is a great way to do this.

Can you ethically build scarcity into your marketing if the item isn’t really in short supply? No. It doesn’t mean that it has never been done, but there is a problem when products are artificially held back to create a perceived insufficient supply to drive consumers into a frenzy. That sort of thing usually is found out and when it is, there is a price to pay for deceiving your customers.

If you want to shorten your marketing cycle, you need to understand the felt need of your customers. Do they have to buy it now to meet that need? If not, is there something you can do to create urgency or communicate scarcity that would trigger their response? The greater the felt need, the quicker marketing works.

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17 Everyday Products Now Facing Shortages by Chris Kissell, Money Talks News, May 6, 2021