Is Your Marketing Working? You Only Know if You Set Goals and Measure Progress

Developing an effective marketing strategy is a necessary component of every business. However, it’s imperative that you set smart goals and measure your progress using the data points that you’re regularly tracking.

Here’s the thing: if you’re doing well and making money, it’s tempting to think you know what you’re doing and why and how you’re making money, but you’re only making assumptions if you aren’t tracking and measuring.

You may attribute your success to the wrong actions, thus risking interrupting your profit-making capabilities when you eventually make the wrong choice based on assumptions and not data. I mean a lot of the time, your assumptions will be right if you know your audience, but eventually – if you don’t use the data you’re collecting – you will make a wrong choice.

But if you use the data you have, the choices you make are more than likely to be accurate, thus helping you avoid actions that don’t lead to profit. What’s even better is your decision-making ability will improve as you keep studying the data, ensuring you are progressing in the direction you want to go.

• Set SMART Goals – Your first step is to set SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. This simply means that your goals must be very specific, something you can measure numerically, and you can’t set the goals so high that they are impossible. They must be something you can really do and achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
• Study Data Regularly – If you’ve set SMART goals and know exactly how to measure to find out if you’re reaching those goals, you’ll need to study the data on a regular basis. For some things, like a launch, you may have to look at the data daily for a couple of weeks but for evergreen marketing materials you may want to check only every 90 days. If you are running ads, you’ll want to check their progress weekly to avoid wasting money.
• Tweak & Update – If anything isn’t going as you planned once you check the data, the awesome thing about digital marketing is that you can easily change things on the fly. For example, if you realize you’re getting lots of clicks on a certain share but no conversions, you can assume something is not right. The landing page may not match the information they clicked through on, so you’ll need to do some tweaking there.

Tracking and measuring results based on your SMART goals is going to help you improve your business in many ways. First, you’ll be more likely to catch mistakes; secondly, you’ll be able to update and improve results more often simply by checking to see if your assumptions (based on research) are really working. Plus, you’ll see clearly where you can make even more audacious goals so that you can keep growing your business.

The Power of Focusing on One Marketing Channel and Promoting One Product at a Time

Sometimes when people start a business, in their excitement to make it, they bite off a little more than they can chew. This ends up causing serious overwhelm and is one of many reasons that people who want to start a business from home online tend not to make it. It’s not because it’s impossible, but because it’s so possible and you can do it in so many ways that it’s easy to get sidelined by “bright shiny object syndrome” and try to do everything at once.

Unfortunately, doing too much at once is usually not a recipe for success. Studies have shown that people cannot really multitask even if they think they are doing it. We all are not good at it despite what we tell ourselves. Therefore, if you pay attention to the studies, and you really want to be successful, you can create leverage by focusing on one thing at a time. Once you get the ball rolling and you’re earning money, it’s easier to branch out and do more, but make sure the one thing is in place and creating success before moving on to the next thing.

When it comes to marketing channels online, there are so many platforms you can use to get the word out about your products and or services. However, as just one person, it’s really going to be hard for you to do all of it and do all of it well. Instead, while you should set up accounts to get the right name for all social media platforms that your audience uses, you probably should not try to use each one fully every single day because you’ll spread yourself too thin.

Pick one marketing channel on which to get the ball rolling. You’ll create a snowball effect that will start paying off effortlessly eventually. Then at that point, you can move on to another marketing channel where you place your focus until it also is running almost on autopilot.

Let’s look at a few marketing channels that you may want to choose to focus on.

• Email Marketing – When you focus on email marketing, you’ll be focused on building your list, nurturing your list, and making more sales to your email list. This may consist of creating content for email messages, content, and bonuses to build the list and other actions. Focusing on email marketing over everything else is almost a no-brainer since it’s the most profitable form of marketing that exists today.
• Social Media Marketing – Using any social platform to market your services or products is social media marketing, whether you pay for ads or use content to get the word out. There are many platforms to choose from. It might help to choose the most popular to start with, build up that channel, then the other channels will grow almost on automatic once you announce them.
• Content Marketing – Using content to get the word out, to educate, inform, engage, and build your brand is a time-honored way to get more traffic and find leads and make more sales. Content may go on your website, social media sites, and in email. Sometimes content marketing focuses on using SEO to bring in traffic. Maybe you need to spend time ensuring you have enough of the right type of content on your site before you do the other channels.
• Affiliate Marketing – Once you have even one signature product or service to sell, starting an affiliate marketing program is a great way to duplicate yourself so that you can make more sales effortlessly. The affiliate is incentivized with a commission as well as awesome and effective marketing collateral that you create for them to use.

The marketing channels you choose depend on what your goals are. Do you want more brand awareness, leads, or sales? Maybe you just want more general traffic generation, or you want to educate your customers. Whatever your goal is will define the channel more clearly. Another factor in choosing the right channel will be your budget.

Also, within the marketing channel, you may want to pick just one thing – for example, with social media marketing, there are numerous avenues to go with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so forth.

You may want to choose just one of those as well to focus on until you build up that platform then move on to the next. The main thing is, don’t stretch yourself too thin as you’re building your business. Outsource as soon as you can so that you can duplicate yourself and focus on more than one thing at a time.

Don’t Let Busy Work Take the Place of Smart Marketing Tasks

One of the most damaging things a business owner can do to themselves is to get so caught up in busy work that they’re working all the time yet not making a profit. It’s especially easy to get dragged down the social media rabbit hole and before you know it you’ve spent an hour or two talking about how cute that doggie is in the window.

We all know that’s not really work, but it happens to the best of us. The best way to ensure that the work you do is effective is to use the data you collect about your audience, your products, and so forth to guide your goals, inform your tasks, and then schedule every action you will take in your calendar, so you know what you’re going to do each day and for how long.

• Write Out a Daily Action List – You can use a calendar or software like Basecamp.com or Trello.com to organize your daily action or daily task list. The list should be organized with the money-making tasks up top, the hardest things up top, and then anything else should be for later or for someone else to do.
• Include Breaks in Your Schedule – No one should work 24/7 without a break, and neither should a business owner. Set up your day so that you have chunks of work time that includes decent breaks. You should try to get up and walk every 90 minutes for about 5 minutes if you are sitting a lot. You should also eat your meals and stay hydrated.
• Focus on One Thing at a Time – When you look at your task list, it’s important to focus on only one thing at a time. If task list says to upload and schedule 30 memes to your Facebook Group, all of which have calls to action for your latest promotion, you should do that all at once.
• Put Money-Making Tasks Up Top – A money-making task is anything that you do that has a direct ability to put money in your bank account. So those 30 scheduled memes that all have calls to action that take your audience to a sales page, or get them on your list, or otherwise move them closer to earning money from them, is imperative to do first each day.
• Start with the Hardest Tasks First – Everyone has a task they don’t like doing, but if it’s a money-making task that you must do yourself, then do it first to get it over with. You may not like the task of uploading all that marketing collateral to your affiliate program, but this is a direct money-making thing because your affiliates will make you money from it, but this could be outsourced to someone else. That Facebook Live you need to do to tell everyone about your new promotion though, no one else can do that, because your business is your face.
• Delegate Non-Money-Making Tasks – When you have non-money-making tasks getting in the way of your money-making ability, it’s time to start outsourcing what you can. At first, it might not even be business related. Mopping your floor makes no money for you, why not get your spouse or child or a housekeeper to do it. Then you can focus more time on making money.

It’s easy to get caught up in simple busywork, particularly anything to do with social media, instead of learning more or working on harder marketing tasks. The best thing you can do is set up regular breaks for yourself so that you can do something that isn’t money-making throughout the day and then also focus better when you are doing those important money-making tasks.

Whenever you are doing something, stop and ask yourself if it’s on your list if it’s a money-making task, and what would happen if you did not do it, or you had someone else do it. If nothing is going to happen negatively, then it’s not an important task to do right away. You can do it later but focus first on the most important tasks and the way to determine that asks whether it leads to a paycheck or not.

Create a Master List of Marketing Tasks That Work Well for You in Your Niche

One way to avoid doing too much busy work or tasks that aren’t productive is to create a master list of marketing tasks that work well for you in your niche. That way, when you do have some extra time, you can work on those tasks.

Think about the fact that if you went to work at a job, they would have systems, processes, and times for doing specific tasks. That’s what you need to have too. When you have this set up, you’re going to experience a boost in income within about 90 days because you are working smartly, building an income by working on tasks that earn money.

It seems like a no-brainer, but often, we just don’t think about the difference between important money-making marketing tasks and product creation tasks most of the time before we start working each day. But if you set up a system and have this list ready during downtimes, you’re going to experience a huge difference in your results.

The marketing tasks that will work for your niche may be different for another niche, but here are a few tasks to get your mind thinking in the right direction as you create your personalized list.

• Write a Blog Post
• Create an Instagram Image for a Blog Post
• Turn Blog Post into a Video
• Tell Your Email Subscribers About the New Post
• Upload Meme on Facebook Scheduler
• Go Live on Facebook to Promote One Thing
• Share Recorded Video to Other Social Platforms
• Upload Live Video to YouTube
• Reply to Comments on Social Media (Choose one Platform)
• Review Stats
• Check Email & Respond to 3 Emails
• Ask a Question to Start a Discussion in Your Groups
• Follow Five New Accounts on One Social Platform
• Review Email Opt-in Rates
• Review Email Open Rates
• Check Your Facebook Ads for ROI
• Transcribe Live Video
• Pitch Yourself to Speak at Events Online & Off
• Review Follower Stats
• Update SEO on 3 Old Blog Posts
• Send an Affiliate Offer to Email Subscribers
• Start a Contest for Affiliates
• Segment Your Email List

You should, of course, add to this list and create your own list. Anything you know that is a marketing task or related to marketing in some way, add to the list. Put the most important money-making tasks, like making offers, at the top.

Anytime you are not sure what to do for your business, look at the list and do something on that list. You want to try to make a money-making offer to your audience at least once a day in order to maximize your income. When you make more money, you will have more freedom because you’ll be able to outsource and delegate even more tasks until you are truly the real manager of your business.

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