This week has been hectic.
Cramming for vacation, while many people are on vacation plus family flying in to see the kids. This all comes with the expectation of…
Performance.
Not performance in the sense of being evaluated (although those reviews have happened recently as well) but from putting on a show.
The benefit we get in this industry is we get to frame how information is presented. How it looks, the touch, how people experience the information and how it makes them feel. Sometimes, its okay to not worry about the presentation. Its okay to not put on a performance.
So, I give you permission to just be yourself for the next couple weeks. Just be your authentic self, whatever that is. Take a breather and get ready for 2020 because we have some amazing opportunities ahead.
Being King of Your Content
Content auditing isn’t something you do once in a while. This is something that is part of your team DNA. As you evaluate the direction your team is going, that’s a time to stop and audit content. Your new content may represent your new direction, but you have a legacy of products, pages and posts that need to fit that direction.
Biggest takeaway from this link: Keep your evaluation simple and try to remove objectivity. You may have some people on your team that created the content originally, try to keep emotion out of the equation.
Distilled: Content Audit Template
Walled Gardens and the Health of the Web
We fight the battle of closed systems everyday as marketers. Increasingly, we’ve been losing that battle. The link in bio strategy is a bandaid on a mortal wound, but Instagram isn’t the only villain. Hiding links, burying them below foldouts or accordions or even obfuscating links are all direct attacks on the public web.
I enjoyed this write-up from Anil Dash and I think its worth your time. I highly encourage any marketer that hasn’t been following the open vs. closed discussions to read this.
We All Belong to Many Tribes
We all know that personalization is imperative, even for B2B. The internet is changing and we can’t count on demographics as being the way to differentiate clients.
Biggest takeaway from this article: Stop breaking people down by age, that’s the lazy route. Respect the diversity of your customers, give your tribes what they need based on their objectives.
Stop Marketing to Millennials or Gen-Z and Start Marketing to Tribes
Where to Focus | Get Better Friday
Earlier this week I was chatting with an acquaintance and he asked about goal setting. He asked, “When you made your career change – what were some of the medium term goals you made for yourself. I’m trying to plan my short, medium, and long term goals in that order.”
Below is my note back. But, I haven’t stopped thinking about this question. We all go about goal setting differently and take an alternate routes, whether we intend to or not. No matter how you go about achieving your objectives, all of it is good. In the end its about getting closer to what you want to do. What will make you happy. That’s all that matters.
More often than not I find myself recommending three things:
- Give yourself permission to try.
- No sunk costs. Pivot any time for any reason.
- Pick a route and never, ever look back.
I see where you are coming from. Long term goals are really that vision you have for yourself and short term are the things you can do right away. But medium goals are much more difficult to figure out because they’re not something you can do right away, but aren’t the end goal either.
One of the ways you could brainstorm would be to breakdown your short term goals by asking, “if I’m successful that means…”.
If I take this course and I’m successful that means I can apply to get certified in and if I’m successful, I get certified then I can get that new promotion.
Breaking this down we see the short term goal is to register for a class (short term). If you successfully pass that means you can then go take the certification test (medium) and then apply for that new job (long term).
The question is why are you doing the short term goals? What’s the very next thing they lead to?
Another way to go about this is instead break your goals down into 90 day sprints. This is more of an agile approach. Instead of breaking the goals down into layers, have a vision of what your long term goal is then create 90 day (or however long works for you) sprints and then all will be short term goals. Personally, I prefer this route. Map out what you can realistically do in the next 90 days making sure everything you pick out leads you closer to that goal.
For example, lets say you wanted to start a YouTube channel for game reviews. For the first 90 days you map out:
- Create a YouTube page
- Add icon, banner graphics
- Create social media accounts
- Make 3 beta recordings and share with at least one friend for feedback
Put dates to each of those things and fill in any gaps for all the steps it takes to do it. Then, at the end of the 90 days look at what you did, what got skipped. Celebrate the wins and then ask yourself if anything you skipped was important. If it is, add it to your next 90 day sprint. Then, list out everything else you think you can do in the next 90 days.
- Publish 5 videos
- Post on social media accounts 2/wk.
- Build video backdrop
No zero days, take little steps every day focusing on the 90 day sprint knowing it will lead you to your vision.
This style gives you the opportunity to pivot when necessary. You might get into this process and decide YouTube isn’t the best for you, may its Twitch or Mixer. Maybe its a podcast, no video at all. This also makes things feel like they’re possible. When doing short, mid, long term goals if you fall behind on short term then it feels like mid goals are impossible. Instead, just focus on the next 90 days.