Heartbeats Versus Micronometers
How are you measuring success?
You’re looking for converts. How does your marketing investment bring home the bacon?
There are hundreds of factors that determine how a lead or prospect becomes a customer. The formula lies in understanding your targets, your company goals, and where those intersect. After that, it’s all agile marketing – testing different mechanics until the exact recipe yields the perfect storm of a conversion funnel.
If you’re simply giving your marketing department marching orders about how many followers, phone calls (God forbid), posts or exactly what images go where… without providing clear and strategic goals, a company aspiration, or ideal customer profile data… you’re creating a strategy for failure and a sobering talent drain. Not to mention an unacceptable waste of time and money. Worst of all, you’re putting a big fat dent in your brand equity. Honestly, it’s not about the TPS reports, is it?
You have a solid marketing team. They have execution and delivery down cold. It’s up to you and your leadership executives to be on the same page and to communicate with one voice the goals of the company – in the next few weeks, months and at least a stretch goal (sometimes called a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG) for the next year or two, depending on your industry. That’s what it is to be visionary.
If you don’t have this piece in place, what exactly are you asking your marketing team to do? Better yet, why? I would argue steering by vision, not detail dogma, will set your marketing team afire, and the proof of this will be the holy grail: conversions. With your visionary leadership, your creative team can be free to establish engaging, successful brand conversion experiences.
Having the heart, the empathy, the connection to other people – particularly your employees – is the difference between a throaty, rumbling engine stoked with real torque, and a sputtering, burping, wheezing carb on the fritz. When you realize every employee wants to look back with pride and say, “I helped build that,” you’ve got heartbeat leadership.
It starts with you, your vision and being crystal clear about your goals for the company.
Don’t have a marketing team? Consider subscribing to a River Dog Marketing report. For more thoughts on empowering your marketing team, I recommend Rand Fishkin’s excellent post.
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