This is part of my Get Better Friday, all about being a better leader. Each piece is about me describing what I’ve been practicing to help me become a better leader and coach for my team, my career and my personal life.
This week:
- How to take disparate goals/tactics and find your real objective.
- Finding out what is important and to keep your focus.
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his also appeared in the CorrTek Marketing Mixer #14 newsletter for Dec. 2 – 6, 2019. Also in the newsletter:
- Would you read the marketing emails you send? Is this actually accomplishing your goals or checking one thing off your todo list.
- Defining good content is hard, especially if you don’t ask your customers how they define good content.
- A fantastic resource for learning digital marketing and what good content looks like.
So… What does success look like for you?
Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking about objectives, goals, and tactics and how those three fit together. Determining the difference between them can be confusing. Last week I told a story, imagining, a year from today, what would you be proud to say that you’ve accomplished in the last year. That you just couldn’t wait to tell people that you got that thing accomplished.
This week, I wanted to talk a bit more about that topic and a powerful question you could ask in figuring out your objectives. It’s not always clear what objectives or goals we’re all trying to accomplish, what are the tactics. There’s a really powerful question you can ask yourself to help identify your vision.
“What does success look like?”
or
“If I was successful that means I…?”
For example, if you were saying,
“Hey Dominic, you know what, I really want. I want to lift the amount engagement that we get on Facebook.”
If you were successful what would that take?
“Well that probably means that I needed to post more often and I need to ask for engagement. Then when people engage, make sure I respond to them.”
Ah ha. Now we’re getting into the tactics. If you are successful that means?
“Well, that probably means I had overall lift on all my social media channels. I had more engagement, more people following and liking and engaging with our brands across all social media channels.”
This sounds like an objective. If you are successful at increasing engagement on Facebook, it sounds like its actually part of a broader objective. Although Facebook is important, it sounds like you are looking to grow all your social channels and see an overall brand lift. What would it take in order for you to do that? What would it look like if you were successful?
“I probably did paid campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, plus more YouTube videos. I posted weekly videos on YouTube. I engaged customers and contacts directly on social channels.”
What would it take in order to get there?
“For me to do that I probably need to buy a camera, have someone to write scripts, find someone that’s going to be in my videos.”
See, you now it starts to put itself together into a full plan. Simply asking what would take for you to be successful, then visualizing tactics which point to goals, which are part of an objective. The original goal was increase Facebook engagement, but now you’ll start having more direct conversations with customers, publish more videos on YouTube while identifying what it will take to accomplish those steps.
Now you can get down even deeper into the tactics. The same thing goes for sales. You might be looking to grow sales by 10%. Ask, “If I was successful that means…?” Perhaps reach a million dollars in sales? That sounds like its really your objective, you want to get to a million dollars in sales. So, if you are successful that means you did what? Increasing number customers I talk to per day, a better web presence, social media brand recognition. What would it take to do that?
That’s how important these questions are, just by asking yourself if I was successful that means I did… What? The only thing I would possibly paue to ask yourself is, “Why is important and is it important to me?” Pausing to ask if it’s important will put the objective or goal into perspective. No sunk costs, if its important to you then keep going. If not, set it aside and re-focus.
Having a vision keeps your eyes open for opportunities. When you have that vision, those objectives identified, you know you’re working towards the vision. You’ve identified where you want to go. The, when new things come in, you can compare it against that objective – That vision – see if it fits and work on it. Just get away from the idea of sunk costs. Ignore that thought, “I already put a lot of time, I put a lot of effort, I’m going to stick with this.” If it doesn’t fit your objective, your vision, dump it.