A guide to setting high-level goals to keep your marketing on track

The range of marketing channels available today and the rate at which they change drives to us to work longer, harder and more efficiently...  it can often feel like you are ice skating uphill. The challenge can seem even harder if realistic goals aren't set to base your plans around.  The lack of goals and just a constant, never-ending journey of 'change' can mean that we miss out on the rewards of achievement. My time spent as part of growing a marketing agency with smaller and larger multi billion dollar companies has taught me that both benefit businesses and staff benefit from moving to clearer goals.

Goals are different to objectives and KPIs

Even in my relatively short time in marketing (9 years), I have seen the rise of data, analytics, information and I…

We've all seen those lists of the world's 'Top 10 converting websites' and  thought 'what could I do to get my site to those stratospheric levels?'.

This post explains why you probably wouldn't want your site to be on one of those lists, and how you can change 'conversion rate' from a not-very-useful-at-all metric into a tool to help improve your site.

The post covers 3 simple issues every business needs to review:

What is conversion rate?Why isn't it the answer to all of the world's problems?What can you do to make conversion rate more meaningful?

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Take control by reducing WILFING and other timesappers

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" Isaac Newton And, of course every inaction has, well, an equal and opposite non-reaction. If we don't  work on the right marketing priorities, if we lack focus on the right marketing activities, then you won't get the result. After all, the world doesn't sit still because you're busy on something of (questionable) priority.

Busy - what does that mean?

It was only recently that the word 'busy' made me think how accurate a term it is for a lot of wasted time in marketing teams. A lot of marketers, me included, have and do spend time being busy - that's busy avoiding the priorities, avoiding doing the hard work. A few friends I have from Liverpool use the term "busy" as a negative term, meaning that…

Learning from Zig Ziglar and Marc Benioff

As a busy marketer working client-side, you'll often hear yourself - and others - talk about not having enough time. That there aren't enough hours in the day. I know from my own (sometimes painful) experiences, when I sometimes sit working on the wrong stuff at 1 AM, that this is rubbish - that we all get the same minutes in the day, it's how we choose to spend them that matters. I believe that it's a matter of focus.

The challenge of focus

Seth Godin recently wrote about FOMO (fear of missing out) and it really resonated from a marketing perspective. Passionate marketers often run themselves and each other ragged, worrying if we're all missing out on the latest insight, learning, app, model, idea, case study or news piece. I understand that, it's often…