[Build Backlinks Online] Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the
Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by MackenzieFogelson

With new tools introduced so regularly, it's easy for marketers to spend an
inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which ones are most effective for
their own work. That focus, though, shifts our attention from what really
matters: setting the right goals for our companies. In today's Whiteboard
Friday, Mackenzie Fogelson walks us through the five-stage process she uses to
make sure her team's attention is on what really matters.






Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard
Friday






For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription


Hey there, Moz community! I'm so excited to be here with you today. I wanted
to share something with you that has been really powerful for the businesses
we've been working with in the last year or so about building community. It's a
concept that we call "goals not tools," and it works in this pyramid format
where you start with your goals, you move on to KPIs, you develop a strategy,
you execute that strategy, and then you analyze your data. And this is something
that has been really powerful and helped businesses really grow. So I'm going to
walk you through it here.
We start down at the bottom with goals. So the deal with goals is that you
want to make sure that you're setting goals for your entire business, not just
for SEO or social media or content marketing, because you're trying to grow your
whole business. So keep your focus there. Then once you develop your goals, and
those goals might be to improve customer communication or you want to become a
thought leader. Whatever your goal is, that's where you're going to set it.


Then you move on to determining what your key performance indicators are and
what you're going to use to actually measure the fact that you may or may not be
reaching your goals. So in terms of KPIs, it's really going to depend on your
business. When we determine KPIs with companies, we sit down and we have that
discussion with them before we develop the strategy, and that helps us to have a
very authentic and realistic discussion about expectations and how this is all
going to work and what kind of data they're expecting to see so that we're
proving that we're actually making a difference in their business.


So once you've determined those KPIs, then you move on to developing a
creative strategy, a creative way to meet those goals and to measure it the way
you've determined in your KPIs. So this is your detailed roadmap, and it's two
to three months at a time. A lot of companies will go for maybe 12 months and
try to get that high level overview of where they're going for the year, and
that's fine. Just make sure that you're not detailing out everything that you're
doing for the next year because it makes it harder to be agile. So we'd
recommend two- to-three month iterations at a time. Go through, test things, and
see how that works.


During your strategy development you're also going to select the tools that
you're going to use. Maybe it's Facebook, maybe it's SEO, maybe it's content
marketing, maybe it's email marketing, PPC. There's all kinds of tools that
could be used, and they don't all have to be digital. So you just need to be
creative and determine what you need to plan out so that you can reach the goals
that you've set.


Then once you've got your strategy developed, that's really some of the
hardest part until you get to execution. Then you're actually doing all the
work. You need to be consistent. You need to make sure that you're staying
focused and following that strategy that you've set. You also want to test
things because you want as much data as possible so that you can determine if
things are working or not. So make sure that during execution there are going to
be things that come up, emergent things, shiny things, exciting things. So what
you'll have to do is weigh whether those things wait for the next iteration in
two to three months, or whether you deviate your plan and you integrate those at
the time that they come up.


So once you're through execution, then really what you're doing is analyzing
that data that you've collected. You're trying to determine: Should we spend
more time on something? Should we pull something? Should we determine if
something else needs to completely change our plans so that we're making sure
that we're adding value? So analysis is probably the most important part because
you're always going to want to be looking at the data.


So in this whole process, what we always do is try to make sure that we're
focusing on two questions, and the most important one is: Where can we add more
value? So always be thinking about what you're doing, and if you can't answer
the value question, you know, "Why are we doing this? Does this provide value
for our customers or something internal that you're working on? If you can't
answer that question, it's probably not something valuable, and you don't need
to spend your time on it. Go somewhere else where you're adding the value.


Then the last question is where you can make the biggest difference in your
business, because that's what this is all about is growing your business. So if
you stay focused on goals, not tools, it's going to be really easy to do that.


Thanks for having me today, Moz. Hope I helped you out. Let me know in the
questions if you need any assistance.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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