Your Marketing Doesn't Need to Be Brilliant. It Needs to Be Relentless.

Every month, thousands of small business owners across Australia ask the same question: what's the better strategy? Should I try TikTok? Switch agencies? Rebuild my Google Ads from scratch? Redesign the website?

They're asking the wrong question entirely.

The businesses that outgrow their competitors aren't running smarter campaigns. They're running the same campaigns longer. They've figured out something that 40 years of marketing science confirms but almost nobody follows: consistency compounds, and switching resets the clock.

The CEO Insight That Explains Everything Wrong With Your Marketing

Jeetu Patel manages 30,000 people at Cisco. He's built products, scaled teams, and navigated complexity most business owners will never encounter. When Lenny Rachitsky asked him what separates people who succeed from those who don't, his answer wasn't intelligence, creativity, or connections.

"Stamina trumps intellect. You can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. You can't teach hunger."

This isn't motivational poster wisdom. It's a pattern that repeats across every domain where compounding effects exist. Investing. Fitness. Skill development. And marketing.

An IPA study on creative consistency found that after five years, the most consistent brands grew market share more than twice as effectively as the least consistent brands, given identical media spend. Not better creative. Not bigger budgets. Just consistency.

Yet the average PPC agency loses 49% of its clients annually, the highest churn rate of any agency service type. Nearly half of all businesses running paid search campaigns switch providers every year. That's not a strategy. That's a reset button being pressed over and over.

What 996 Award-Winning Campaigns Tell Us About Patience

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns from the IPA effectiveness database spanning decades of real-world results. Their findings explain why your three-month experiment never seems to deliver what you hoped.

Brand-building campaigns and sales activation campaigns work on completely different timelines. Activation (direct response, lead gen, offers) peaks fast and decays fast. Brand building (awareness, memory structures, mental availability) starts slow but compounds over time.

The IPA data shows that shifting from a performance-only approach to a balanced brand-plus-performance approach delivers a 90% average ROI uplift. But you only capture that uplift if you stay long enough for the brand effects to compound. Your marketing budget is a portfolio, and portfolios need time.

Why You Quit (Even When It's Working)

Daniel Kahneman's research explains the behaviour that Binet and Field's data describes.

Now apply this to a business owner spending $3,000 per month on marketing.

Every month, the $3,000 leaving the account registers as a concrete, visible loss. The mental availability being built in the minds of future buyers? Invisible. Unmeasurable on a monthly dashboard. Your reporting shows clicks and leads, not "percentage of the market that now vaguely remembers your brand exists."

Kahneman identified another mechanism that compounds the problem: the substitution heuristic. When faced with a hard question ("Is my brand becoming more mentally available to future buyers?"), we unconsciously substitute an easier question ("Did I get enough leads this week?"). The answers to these two questions can be completely different, but we act on the easy one.

This is exactly why your marketing dashboard can mislead you. The metrics it shows are real. They're just answering the wrong question.

Byron Sharp's research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute adds the final piece. His work established what's now called the 95/5 rule: at any given time, only about 5% of your potential market is actively looking to buy. The other 95% aren't in the market today but will be at some point in the future.

Your Google Ads capture some of the 5%. Your consistent presence builds memory structures in the 95%. But because the 95% aren't converting right now, that spend looks wasted on a monthly report. It isn't. It's the only reason they'll think of you when they eventually enter the market. We've written before about why 95% of your future customers aren't Googling you. The implication for persistence is clear: if you're only measuring the in-market 5%, you'll always feel like marketing isn't working, even when it is.

The Excess Share of Voice Effect (And Why Being Small Is an Advantage)

There's a relationship in marketing science validated across hundreds of campaigns: Excess Share of Voice (ESOV). When your share of advertising voice exceeds your share of market, your market share grows. When it falls below, your share declines.

That sounds small. But it compounds. And here's the part most small businesses miss: challenger brands and new entrants grow 15-25% more per point of ESOV than established brands. Being small is actually an advantage. You get more growth per dollar of excess voice precisely because you're starting from a lower base.

The catch: ESOV only works if you maintain it. Every time you stop advertising, switch channels, or reset your strategy, the clock resets. The memory structures you've been building begin to decay. A 20-year Ehrenberg-Bass study tracking 57 Australian consumer goods brands confirmed that mental and physical availability help brands keep momentum, but only while the investment continues.

The Two Plumbers Problem

Consider two Adelaide plumbing businesses. Both spend $3,000 per month on Google Ads. Both start with roughly the same market position.

After 12 months, Plumber B has:

• 12 months of conversion data feeding Google's algorithms. Smart Bidding gets dramatically better with more data, and every reset starves it.
• A Quality Score advantage from consistent, relevant ad history.
• Accumulated reviews and trust signals from a stable web presence.
• Mental availability among the local market from consistent visibility.
• A clear performance picture, because nothing was reset mid-stream.

Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, described growth at his company the same way. "It looks from the outside like over a long time up and to the right and smooth, but inside it was two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back." The line only trends upward if you don't quit between the steps.

When You Should Change (And When You Shouldn't)

None of this means you should stubbornly persist with a strategy that's fundamentally broken. The distinction matters.

Rory Sutherland's concept of satisficing is useful here. Instead of endlessly searching for the optimal strategy (which doesn't exist and changes constantly), find a good-enough strategy and persist with it. Put your optimisation energy into improving execution within that strategy rather than replacing the entire approach every quarter.

Sam Tomlinson's research reinforces this: roughly 90% of ad performance is driven by factors outside the ad account. Your sales process. Your offer. Your website experience. Your follow-up speed. If your campaigns aren't delivering, the answer usually isn't a new campaign. It's fixing what happens after the click.

Here's a framework for when to adjust versus when to stay the course:

What This Means for Your Business

The maths of marketing persistence is straightforward.

Three things to do this week:

• Set a 12-month minimum commitment for your primary marketing channel. Build it into your agreement. Remove the temptation to reset at the first dip.
• Separate your evaluation metrics. Short-term (monthly): leads, cost per lead, conversion rate. Long-term (quarterly): brand search volume, direct traffic, share of voice. Don't judge a long-term investment with a short-term metric.
• Redirect your optimisation energy inward. Instead of looking for a new strategy, improve execution within your current one. Better landing pages, faster follow-up, stronger offers. That's where the real leverage sits.

Further Reading

• The Long and the Short of It (IPA) - Binet & Field's foundational research on balancing short-term activation with long-term brand building across 996 campaigns
• Excess Share of Voice: The Evidence-Based Growth Framework (INVRSN) - How ESOV drives market share growth, with data showing challenger brands benefit disproportionately
• 5 Priorities for Effective Advertising (Ehrenberg-Bass) - Research on reach, consistency, and mental availability from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
• How Creative Consistency Strengthens Brands (IPA) - IPA data showing consistent brands grow share 2x faster than inconsistent ones over five years
• What Happens When Brands Stop Advertising? (Ehrenberg-Bass) - 20-year Australian study on the effects of stopping advertising