The Importance of Staying Curious in a World Focused on Certainty

As I embark on the H2 planning process, it seems the opportune time to reflect on what I’ve learned over the first half of this year … and honestly my entire career. What has been my greatest lesson? Stay curious.

We all operate in a culture that is evermore rewarding of certainty. We learn this from a young age through schooling, and our certainty continues to be reinforced as we seek confirmation bias through our social groups, social media and media in general. Being certain is often associated with confidence and competency in our workplaces. While certainty certainly has its place, my biggest takeaway over the years is that accepting uncertainly and staying curious serves me best.  

When we stay curious, we ask all kinds of questions about ourselves, about others, about what we think we know. This curiosity provides countless opportunities to learn, grow and improve. Staying curious gives us the freedom to operate outside of the predefined boxes we may have drawn for ourselves and others. It deepens our relationships. It makes us better leaders. It magnifies our passion. It surprises us. Curiosity opens doors we didn’t even know were there, and its gifts are endless.

So, my wish as I head into the second half of the year is that I stay curious and you will too.

Delivering Meaningful Marketing Metrics

One of the most important things a marketer can do is provide meaningful metrics that show how their work performed. Not only does it help you, as a marketer, see how your work is performing, it helps others, whether they are your clients, your executive leadership, your boss or your team, understand the impact of what you’re working on.

Without measurement, you’ll forever be throwing spaghetti against a wall without ever knowing what sticks. The marketing community agrees. I haven’t met a marketer yet who doesn’t think that measurement is important, but how and what to measure can be harder to nail down. Measuring the work you do in a meaningful way can be tricky. Because of this, sometimes marketers rely on vanity metrics like the number of likes on a Facebook post instead of meaningful metrics like how the likes on that post actually turned into dollar-producing business or qualified leads. Here’s how you can ditch the vanity metrics and deliver meaningful metrics moving forward:

1.  Set goals for your marketing projects. – Your marketing goals should be directly tied to business goals. These goals will be what you measure against, so make sure they are meaningful, achievable, measurable and, maybe most importantly, you actually have access to the right tools to provide the data you need to measure against them.

2. Paint the picture. – When you are reporting, tell the story of the entire marketing journey. This allows you to incorporate how many opens and clicks those amazing marketing emails you wrote got along with the meaty metrics of how many people converted because of those emails.

3. Keep it high level. - This is especially important when reporting outside of marketing organizations. Ultimately, you want to tell the story of how marketing positively impacted the bottom line, so lead with this. Also, keep the marketing jargon to a minimum in your reporting.  

4. Make sure you know the full story. – If there were outside influences and variables that can be attributed to the success (or failure) of a marketing campaign, be sure to share those. A good indicator of outside influences and variables at play is when you observe outliers in the data that you can’t explain with your marketing efforts.

5. Be honest. – Don’t inflate results or piece together a story that is loosely based on a few select data points. You’re better than that, and your ethical standards (or lack of them) reflect on the entire industry. Not to mention, dishonesty always catches up with you.

You’re 10 Steps Away from a Solid Demand Generation Strategy

You have a brand, a compelling offering and a digital presence. Now what? How do you generate demand? It’s time to think about your demand generation strategy.

The good news: You’re only 10 steps away from creating a marketing formula uniquely tailored to your audience, your brand and your product or offering.

A couple pro tips before you start on this path:

- Have a clear understanding of your overall business goals and be prepared to use your pipeline/revenue goals to inform this process.

- Be prepared to dedicate time to these steps.

OK! Let’s jump in:

1. Set measurable goals - Creating a measurable, actionable, timely definition of success is the foundation of a digital marketing plan. Use your business goals to inform and guide your marketing goal-setting process.  Not sure where to start? Use a demand generation waterfall to map out how you’ll need to fuel your pipeline to meet your revenue goals.

2. Identify target audience(s) - Define your target audience(s). A good place to start is by looking at your current customer list and/or mapping the pain points your offering solves with the people/organizations most likely to be experiencing that pain. Don’t be afraid to get specific.

3. Conduct research - Learn where you’ll find your audience, how they interact with brands and consume media, and the needs and challenges each audience segment faces. Keep tabs on what are other players in your space are doing to engage their audiences. Welcome opportunities to stay up to speed on current industry best practices. 

4. Flesh out messaging - Create a messaging framework built around your value proposition and the pain points you solve for your target audience. Remember, messaging isn’t static so come up with options and be ready to test them.

5. Map out a marketing funnel  - Outline the marketing journey your prospects will take and then think through how you’ll get prospects into and move them through that funnel. This funnel should address awareness through closed/won stages and consider how marketing and sales will work together throughout the funnel.

6. Allocate budget - Be prepared to spend some money.  Create a budgeting worksheet that details exactly where you will spend your budget and what results you expect based on your previous results or industry standards.

7. Create a channel strategy - Use the knowledge of how your audience consumes media and where they interact along with conversion data by channel to inform your channel strategy. Your channel strategy will be a combination of paid, owned and earned channels.

8. Generate content - The foundation of all solid demand generation strategies is content. Look at your marketing funnel and channel strategy to identify what content you’ll need and where. Use your messaging and the intel you have on your target audience to produce meaningful content that will spark engagement.

9. Get started - Ready, set, go! Deploy your marketing campaign and start testing and experimenting.

10. Monitor and calibrate - Continuous monitoring and reporting on results will help you calibrate your marketing strategy data-informed decision making ensuring you aren’t wasting time and money. Use your findings to make adjustments. Marketing is a journey not a destination. A marketer’s job is never done. Things evolve, what resonates changes, trends shift, new channels and technologies emerge, and current events happen, which all may result in needing to adjust your strategy to ongoing market conditions.