Marketers everywhere are scrambling to set their marketing and digital marketing strategies for the coming year, and encountering obstacles ranging from corporate politics to shifting or disappearing budgets to a lack of appropriate information upon which to base that strategy. Most would welcome a tested approach to help define a strategy in a way that can drive planning and action and get internal support, but first we have to agree on what that strategy is. A budget allocation is not a strategy; neither is a goal a strategy – regardless of how well-defined that goal might be. The strategy is the much-needed plan to get you from your current state to your desired state.

This is an outline of a 12-step plan to help you understand your current state, define your desired state, and plot your strategy to bridge the gap from one to the other for a successful 2012 in digital marketing.

Understanding your current state:

1. Review past results. In an industry like ours, the past should be viewed primarily as a directional guide because all of the opportunities and channels have morphed in significant ways in the last year. Don’t ignore the stats but delve well-beyond them to the important insights about audience behaviors, channel preferences, and other learnings that can be applied to the opportunities present now.Start with the past year’s results (or another appropriate time period) against goals. Look at channel-specific impacts. Identify both the spectacular winning and losing efforts of the past and dissect them to understand why they fell in one camp or the other. Gather all of your stats – site, social media channels, email lists, etc. (including trending data) and dig in. Identify any dips or spikes in activity or performance and explain them.
2. Review environmental realities and changes. As noted, the world continues to spin while we make our plans and you want your new strategy to be relevant, so take into account any channel or industry changes. Do you have new competitors? New distribution options? New regulations? Supply chain issues? Budget challenges? Bad PR or a failed product launch to overcome? Factor the real world into your planning and identify key opportunities as well as risk factors.Document competitor activity including any new entrants noting spend, approach (channels, tactics), messaging, assets, and results. Set trackers to follow their progress and try and look for patterns that suggest where they are seeing results.

   Look for any changes in your audience. Mine your stats in various channels to establish demos and any trending information you can use. Use your partners to gather behavioral data.

Defining your desired state:

1. Articulate business goals. The marketing strategy and goals are nonsense if they do not ultimately reflect and support the business goals. Start at the top to understand what business moves and impacts on your organization plans to make for the year and how you can accomplish them. Translate those business goals into specific, quantifiable objectives with timeframes that can help define your optimal marketing strategy.
2. Articulate channel goals. Review all your options and identify how each channel is best used for your overall marketing goals. The channels and options are not interchangeable and each should have its own set of objectives. Look at how each one can contribute to the overall goals. In a best case, they help and support each other. Some elements of the plan might be great at driving awareness or traffic, while others create an excellent platform for remarketing, for example. Budgets, timeframes, messaging, and other elements should be revised according to your plan needs. Don’t forget your offline elements in this mix.
3. Articulate testing goals. What questions do you want to be able to answer about your audience, products, business, or campaigns this year? Set yourself up for success by structuring those tests to ensure the answers in advance.

Setting your strategy:

1. Confirm total budget. Unless you live in a fairytale marketing world, this budget is probably handed down to you before you have a chance to set the strategy. If the established budget does not give you the ability to meet your marketing goals, then you must prioritize, clearly communicate the lost opportunities, and set revised goals that make sense within the budget parameters. To make the most of your budget, establish out-clauses that don’t tie your hands as you optimize across channels once you start getting results.
2. Brainstorm initial approaches/tactics and messaging. Allocate budget across goals (not channels!). This is often the step where people start their strategy work – in a room with a white board and not enough information to get the job done well. The tactics that make up your strategy should be the steps that take you from your current to your desired state. Even the best, most innovative ideas may not take you down the path you need. Be sure to continually check back to your defined path while involved in your brainstorming so you won’t be tempted off course.Now that you have a set budget, you need to tie that budget back to your goals – not the channels. Don’t forget creative or production budgets, email broadcast fees, talent, stock, or other miscellaneous add-ons.
3. Allocate budgets for an initial period. It may be tempting to set the strategy for the entire year and wash your hands of the exercise, but in reality the plan is never set in concrete and should be optimized regularly for best results. One way to ensure regular check-ins is to mandate them by planning for an initial period and institutionalizing the regular review. The length of that initial period may depend on the seasonality and other factors specific to your business.
4. Set project timelines checking assets and resources for the proposed plans. It’s reality-check time. You have done your homework and stayed on plan and in budget to define your strategy, but there are still risk factors. Now is the time that strong project management can save the day. Do you have the time, expertise, and resources to execute on your strategy? Double-check with vendor partners on specs and lead times so you don’t have any surprises.
5. Sit on the finished plan for at least a couple of days and then review it with fresh eyes. Have you accounted for mobile, social, email, site impacts, integration with offline elements? New browser updates or devices? In your gut, does this feel like the right way to go or a watered down compromise? Ask someone not involved in the plan production to review the background information and completed plan. An outside consultant can be very helpful here.
6. Set appropriate internal expectations on results. Make sure everyone’s expectations are set on the scale and speed with which you expect to see results. Set official check-in dates with a dashboard that tracks results against stated goals and outlines recommended next steps. This should allow you to continue to march forward toward that desired state without uninformed organizational nervous twitches creating panicked off-plan responses.
7. Create a concise mission statement for your plan. Use this mission statement to rally the troops, remind everyone of the goals, and to test the new inputs that will invariably come up during the year. If you can’t articulate what you want to achieve with this multi-faceted, multi-dimensional plan in a sentence or two, start back up at step No. 1.

Have you started down the strategy road for 2012?

Article source: ClickZ

 

Social media is a highly effective channel for numerous business objectives, including driving revenue, but it remains a challenge to directly demonstrate revenue impact in the way that more straightforward sales efforts can claim through, for example, search. While marketing budgets (especially digital budgets) are bouncing back in the post-recession era, marketers still require a strong analytical link between spend and delivery against business goals to have the confidence to invest. That combination of spend and delivery against goals is what defines performance, but it requires that you can define both spend and delivery individually. Those definitions remain a challenge for social media.

Spend

It’s hard to quantify the spend on foundational aspects of social media. Spend might include overhead for internal personnel involved in customer service or promotions or sweeps designed to attract new followers. It might include training or new staff, the build of new creative or channels for communication, or a host of other expenditures that can’t be tracked to immediate sales. For instance, how do you measure the time value to tweet against your sales in that period? How do you factor in qualitative differences, i.e., doing it well vs. poorly or the cumulative effect of positive exposures on the propensity to recommend or buy? Earned media pros have tackled these questions for as long as the professions have been around.

Delivery

Social media has born a whole new set of engagement and influence markers that we know are valuable but are hard to put a value on. You can certainly measure lots of impact from social media. You can infer awareness from metrics like page views, visitors, “likes,” and followers. Intent might be derived from metrics like email opt-in, request more info forms and even time spent on site, coupon downloads, or sharing button clicks. Conversions in social commerce situations could in fact be a purchase but could also be defined as an email opt-in, depending on the goals. When revenue is your primary goal and you have other, relatively more straightforward channels like search to weigh it against, the safe marketer might stick with the straighter measurement path. But choosing your strategy based on its ability to return metrics – not results – is flawed thinking.

Studies that can benchmark the value of a Facebook fan, for instance, help us to connect the dots between our social media investment and the eventual return on that investment. But like all marketing endeavors, social media can be used for many different business goals. Not all of those paths lead to short-term sale, nor should they. If every marketing tactic is direct response-driven and we spend no time cultivating customers, then we will only succeed in closing sales of a) those that know and trust us already and b) those that are in market or have immediate need of our product or service. We can all see where that would be limiting.

There are few verticals more revenue-focused than retail/etail, and many in that industry have jumped into social media, glad for the opportunity to open communication channels with consumers, get them engaged, establish credibility, nurture advocates, and, oh, by the way, deliver timely brand and product messages. The promotional aspects of social media are a good fit for etail customer acquisition goals where they can define a lifetime value of a customer. Sweeps or contests are a popular social media tactic to deliver traffic and build email and fan lists and often have defined budgets so you can do a pretty good post review that maps those metrics as well as direct sales from the promo against the cost to develop, build, and run the promotion. While the promo often gets the credit, the costs and results of that promo are intertwined with the costs and efficacy of the social media foundation you have laid in advance of that effort.

In many ways, the upfront and ongoing investment in social media is not very different from the foundation required to establish a platform for profitable e-commerce. Measuring traffic and sales-driving efforts like display media and search is deceptively simple – except that it’s not, and we won’t even touch here on the myriad attribution issues that muddy the waters on assigning credit for online sales. Drop qualified traffic on a page that is not optimized, has out-of-date merchandise, or a product that is low in inventory and your results will suffer. Likewise, if you haven’t opened genuine channels with your customers, responded in a timely and appropriate manner, and earned their trust and time, then you won’t earn their dollars.

While most of us intuitively understand that engaging our customers and prospective customers, listening, and responding supports the long-term goal of brand building and all marketing goals – many don’t yet have the confidence to declare social media a revenue channel. We are missing a comprehensive set of tools to justify a social media investment for those marketers focused primarily or exclusively on revenue generation and metrics. We’re simply not used to thinking of revenue production in a longer-term window in digital marketing. We’re usually measuring sales against the marketing tactics in the same period or shortly thereafter within a given cookie or measurement window. Social media, in that sense, is more like SEO in that it is an investment in the longer-term brand health and in audience growth. Those lead to sales – directly, even if we can’t always measure them directly.

Article source: ClickZ

 

One of the things that many people grapple with in their personal lives is nutrition and fitness.  However, this topic can be very daunting for a couple of reasons.  The first is that tracking our nutrition and fitness makes it much more “real.”  Speaking for myself, it is much easier to talk my way around making smarter food choices when I was not keeping track of what I was eating.

This is where the power of a tracking system comes into play.  By keeping track of your nutrition through a free online portal such as Spark People, it provides a very powerful tool for reaching your personal fitness goals.  One of the most prominent difficulties people encounter when trying to stay fit is the natural human propensity to under-estimate the amount of calories that are consumed.  This makes it very easy to over-consume, and equally difficult to move toward our fitness goals.

By tracking our food and exercise, it gives a very powerful tool for pursuing our persona fitness goals. In addition to tracking total calories, Spark People allows you to track the split between carbohydrates, fat, protien, and a vast variety of micro-nutrients.  This allows us to move beyond simply counting calories to gathering a full view of our personal nutrition regimen.

It is important to understand that a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories.  The way that we gain fat is to consumer more calories than we burn, and the way we lose fat is to burn more calories than we consume.  Most of the daily weight fluctuations that most people experience are nothing more or less than water weight.  The way to achieve a weight loss goal is to consume less calories than we burn on a regular basis.  Fortunately, the Internet has delivered tools such as Spark People to help us in tracking our activities and achieving our goals.

 

As we go throughout business and life, many of us will set use goals to focus our attention and activities.  This is a highly important activity, because the process of writing our goals down gives them a feeling of tangible reality that is frequently absent when they exist only within our mind.  Of course, goal setting can be a tricky science since setting goals that are too easy will lead to a lack of achievement, and setting goals that are too hard will lead to discouragement as our goals go by without being met.

One of the intellectual godparents of personal success is Dennis Waitley.  His library of books, speeches, and presentations about achieving your goals have become legend among those who seek to scale the heights of great achievement.  The way that Dr. Waitley describes the ideal formation of goals is that they should be “Just out of reach, but not out of sight.”

Just out of Reach, but Not out of Sight

The subtle wit and wisdom of Dennis Waitley demonstrates the dichotomy of goal setting in a highly poetic and beautiful manner.  Goals should be set just beyond our current abilities and achievement to force ourselves to stretch.  The process of growth requires that we push beyond our current limitations to do things that we previously thought to be unachievable.  This phenomenon also plays itself out in the natural world as well.  Body builders know all too well that muscles grow by breaking down the existing fibers so that they grow back larger and stronger.  In this way, training to achieve new heights means that we must constantly break down what has already been achieved so that it can come back even stronger than before.

In keeping with the metaphor of personal training, it is also important to avoid over training.  Many aspiring athletes fall into the trap of attempting to build their strength and endurance too quickly, and incur injuries.  In regard to our goals and ambitions, setting goals that are too ambitious and too difficult will generate injuries to our drive and ambition.  Thus, goal setting is fundamentally about striking a balance that is ‘just right’ between being too easy and too hard.

Now that You Have a Goal, How do You Stick to It?

Once a person has set their goals, the next step is to continue pursuing that goal throughout the difficulties and temporary failure that frequently accompany worthwhile achievement.  The process of growth and development is frequently uncomfortable, since it involves simultaneously stretching beyond our current limits and temporarily failing to reach our desired goals.  This make sit very easy to become discouraged and possibly even give up on achieving our goals.

The answer to this natural tendency is to find a goal that naturally holds our attention, without consistent conscious effort.  This is the motivation behind David Schwartz’s book: The Magic of Thinking Big.  The insight that David Schwartz unfolds in his book is the transformative effect of setting goals that are big and inspiring.  Of course, this philosophy runs the risk of setting a goal that is too ambitious and results in discouraging failure.

So what is a person to do?  Goal setting is supposed to be about something that is both meaningful and achievable, but sticking to a goal is easiest when the goal is big and inspiring.  These two concepts appear to be in conflict with one another.  So how can we possibly set a realistic goal that is simultaneously big and inspiring?  To answer this, we need to think outside of traditional thought patters.  The first idea to wrap our mind around is the notion that there is no limitation to the size and scope of goals that we can set or undertake.  Thus, it is quite possible (and even recommended) that we select a large, inspiring goal and break that big goal into many smaller steps that are each sequentially achievable.

One Big Goal and Many Smaller Goals

The combination of a single big, inspiring objective, and many smaller goals that are sequential, achievable, and all lead to one single motivating objective.  It is likely that these smaller goals will build upon one another until they result in the single large goal that you set out to achieve in the first place.  The big goal serves to motivate our efforts and keeps our mind on the goal when progress slows and prospects become discouraging.  The small goals serve to systematically grow our achievement and abilities with small, achievable steps.

Thus, the ‘secret’ of goal setting is neither to set “realistic” goals, nor to set “big” ones.  The answer is to do both.  Motivation and ambition are deeply personal and individual sentiments.  The first step in keeping your mind on the goal is to find a primary goal that is inspiring enough to hold your attention without conscious effort.  Once this goal has been selected, break it down into small, achievable steps.

Ultimately, keeping our mind on the goals we seek to achieve is really about making sure that the goal we are pursuing is sufficiently inspiring to hold our attention naturally.  Keeping your mind on the goal is really about finding a big goal that is always on your mind, and consistently reminds of of the smaller goals that are a necessary part of its acquisition.

It is not possible to consistently focus our minds on everything.  Life is a serious of increasing and decreasing focus.  The wealth of information we live in the midst of creates a deficit of attention.  The power of a big, inspiring goal is that it regularly pulls our attention in the direction of our specific goals, and only requires a small amount of incremental focus.  In the end, holding to your goals requires both the existence of an inspiring end-goal, and many smaller goals that all contribute to the single, larger objective.  By keeping the power of inspiration and achievement in balance, it will allow you to steadily move toward achieving the goals and ambitions of your life.

 

Many people are familiar with the sentiment that “the end justifies the means” when pursuing goals and ambitions.  However, in the realm of business and life, ends and means are quite important.  In many cases, ‘how’ you go about doing something is equally (if not more) important than what you are doing in the first place.  Many times, it is easy to pursue short-term results by bending or breaking rules.  However, long-term success requires attention to both the goal and the methods used to reach it.

Most people recognize this fact in the natural world.  It is not difficult to see what happens if you attempt to plant and harvest wheat without following the right steps.  No matter how hard you try, it is not possible to ‘wing it’ to success in the natural world.  However, many people are gripped with a desire to fast-talk their way to success in the world of business and relationships.

The truth is that ends and means are a matter of natural law that hold equally true in the physical world as they do in the world of relationships.  The fundamental difference is that when dealing with people, it takes longer to see the impact.  However, the impact is always in effect regardless of whether it is immediately apparent.  The hard work must be done if ‘real’ success is every to be achieved.  It may be possible to temporarily gain the appearance of success through slick dealing and clever tricks, but there is no way to fool nature.

Ultimately, the way that each person chooses to pursue their goals is important.  Relentless pursuit of excellence sounds great in commercials, but if it causes you to sacrifice everything else in your life for the sake of one goal, is it really a worthy endeavor?  This is not to say that people should not have goals and ambitions . . . quite to the contrary.  However, it is imperative that the pursuit of those goals be done in such a way that it is part of a complete life and not an unbalanced obsession.  This will likely result in many goals that take longer to accomplish than some of us would like, but it will also result in greater happiness, contentment, and completeness in our lives.

 

Life can frequently feel out of control with a myriad of commitments, deadlines, and things that need to be done immediately.  Each of us have a list of things we would like to accomplish that exceeds our available time, effort and energy by a considerable margin.  In this situation, it frequently feels like we cannot afford to stop moving, because every minute gone by is one less minute to accomplish our goals and ambitions.

 

In the world of real estate investment, there is a term known as ‘highest and best use’ to describe the best possible use for a building or area of land.  When making decisions, many investors will stop to consider the highest and best use for the land that they are considering to purchase.  Would it be better to add another rental unit?  Would it be advantageous to add a garage or storage area?  It may be that the best use for a building is to tear it down and start over.  On the other hand, it may be that the current use of a property is the best use.

This same kind of analysis should be done for our personal decisions and the use of our time.  Every time you are doing something, ask yourself if it is the highest and best use of your time at that particular moment.  When you are undertaking a project, is it the best use of your efforts and energy?  The purpose of this analysis is to systematically replace the activities that do not represent the best use of your time with new ones that allow you to be more effective in accomplishing your goals.

When conducting this introspection and analysis, it is very important to keep your ‘true’ goals and objectives in perspective.  It can be easy to obsess on business or career goals, and forget personal and family priorities that are even more important to your long term well-being.  An example of this is taking time to play with your children.  As you replace more and more activities with the highest and best use for your time, you will find yourself moving closer and closer to your goals.

As time goes by, it is likely that your perceptions concerning the highest and best use of your time will change.  The important part is to be constantly thinking about your personal, professional, and financial priorities.  This thought process should guide the decisions you make concerning how to spend your time.  As you slowly change the priorities that guide each of your decisions, you will notice yourself moving closer and closer to your goals.  The movement is not necessarily the result of a grand strategy, but by consistent decisions that each bring you a little bit closer to your goals.

 

One of the notions that has come into vogue during the current generation of personal success literature is the idea of focusing on what is important.  It is difficult to argue against this premise, but when we are seeking to achieve success it is critical to really understand what important means.  Most of us think of important people as having places to go and things to do.  We also typically think that important people are busy.

However, there are a few things about pursuing the important that we should be certain to understand.  The first is that being good at something doesn’t necessarily make it important.  Many of us gain a feeling of importance from doing things that we are good at.  However, we do not necessarily know whether what we are good at is serving a useful purpose other than making us feel like we’re doing something that’s important.  Ultimately, what makes something important is not how good we are at it, but how much of an impact it has on our personal, professional, and financial priorities.

The second is that spending a lot of time on something doesn’t necessarily make it important.  This is especially important in office environments, where go-for assignments, meetings, and other rock fetching requests aggregate into an environment of professional tail spinning.  How many of these activities directly produce business results?  How many directly influence business decisions?  How many are just a glorified waste of time that serve the sole purpose of making whomever is in charge feel important because they have the authority to order an army of subordinates?

The third is that somebody wanting something right away doesn’t necessarily make it important.  This is what is frequently referred to as the “Tyranny of the Urgent” by people like Stephen Covey.  This is possibly the most typical and most dangerous mis-perception about importance.  The reason is because urgency makes us uncomfortable.  When something is expected to be done right away (regardless of whether it is important), it nags at our minds.  In many cases, the path of least resistance is to simply do the task so that people will stop nagging you.  It is worthwhile to point out that many urgent items are frequently important . . . however, urgency is not in and of itself a creator of importance.  The impact of something you are (or are not) doing is completely independent of its urgency.

By now, I’m sure that you’re wondering how to determine what is really important.  The critical factor that takes us out of the urgent, nice, and simple wastes of time to that which is truly important.  Fortunately, there is a very simple test that will quickly determine what is truly important for your life.  This test is to ask whether what you are doing is helping you accomplish your goals.  The exact goals to be accomplished are individual to each person, but it is the movement toward those goals that make something important.  Naturally, the more important the goal, the higher a priority we should place on accomplishing it.  By defining what is important, it will help us to systematically move toward our goals and priorities while minimizing the roadblocks that frequently impede our progress.

 

One of the most true axioms of life is that all things have their price.  This is true for things we want to buy, and also true for things we want to achieve.  For all things that we want in our lives, a price must be paid.  Sometimes this price is paid in money, other times it is paid in effort, but at all times it is paid in lost opportunity.

Any time that we take one action, it means that we are implicitly choosing not to take a different action.  Over time, these choices shape and define our future.   We decide to pursue our ambitions or we decide to stick with what feels safe.  We choose to prioritize our families or we allow the urgency of whatever we are doing at the moment to take precedent over that which we tell ourselves is most important.

As we go throughout our lives, each of us will need to forge our own definition of the success that we are seeking and the price that we are willing to pay in exchange for it.  These conscious decisions regarding the priorities of our life are what determine how we deal with conflicts between our personal, professional, and financial goals.  When two objectives are standing in opposition to one another, we must first seek a smarter solution that does not sacrifice one for the other.  When a smarter solution is not possible, we must ultimately choose.

Most people desire to maintain a successful family life and a prosperous career or business.  In most cases, these two goals compliment one another.  However, they can come into conflict if a particular family event conflicts with business.  In these cases, we must ultimately decide which tenet of our personal vision to pursue.  The important point to communicate is that this is a choice we should consciously make, lest we fall into the unconscious trap of prioritizing the seemingly urgent over that which is truly important.

This insidious form of lazy thinking is how many people end up extremely busy, but not remotely productive.  Decide what your vision of success looks like.  Decide what price you are willing to pay in order to achieve that vision.  Decide what price you are not willing to pay.  Actively do that which brings you closer to your vision of success.  Actively avoid that which takes your time, but does not achieve your goals.  Turn everything that you do into a conscious decision that consistently propels you closer to your goals.  By paying the price for success, you will also be laying the foundation for a more prosperous and fulfilling life.

 

Many of us have become accustomed to frequent ‘tips’ and ‘analysis’ about the new hot trade.  Most of us cannot open our email accounts or turn on the radio without being bombarded with an advertisement to buy gold.  What frequently gets lost in all of this noise about fast trades and quick profits is our long-term goals.  The way that this happens is that the daily grind becomes more important than the specific actions that take us to our goals and aspirations.

Because of this, it is critically important for astute individuals to shift their thinking.  Many of us are infected with a terminal desire to produce fast results.  This leads us to seek the “trade of the day” that will immediately shoot up and produce immediate profits.  However, successful people have come to understand that  it’s not about the trade of the day, it’s about the decision of the decade.  By simply making one major, meaningful, and high-impact decision each decade, and then following through on the execution of that decision.  By following this method, it will continually focus your mind on big, long-term goals.  Thus, each day ceases being about finding some new fad, and shifts over toward small, tangible steps that continually move you closer to your long-term goals.

Another advantage of thinking in this manner is that it can serve as a forcing function for prioritization.  If there is one major goal that you seek to accomplish each decade, it stands to reason that the goal deserves some consideration.  Implicit within selecting and pursuing this goal is deciding what will ‘not’ be prioritized while you are accomplishing these aspirations.  In many cases, deciding what you are ‘not’ doing can be just as powerful as deciding what you want to pursue.  The reason for this is that each day brings new distractions and more noise from things that are utterly unimportant to our long-term goals and most important priorities.

In the process of defining your goals, deciding to pursue them, and following through with your decision, eliminating noise will be a major factor in your success.  By systematically shifting focus back to your goals, it will help in eliminating the ‘noise’ that frequently stands in the way of great accomplishments.  Each of us has the ability to accomplish anything we want to do . . . however, we do not have the ability to accomplish everything we want to do.  Success requires that we decide, focus, and accomplish.