What are your goals?

As marketing or creatives professionals, sometimes we find ourselves in a system without proper structure or policies that guides operational effectiveness, but you are still required to "be creative" and deliver on every project, even those occasional verbal outbursts of demands from the superiors.

It is easy to fall into an abyss of nothingness, even with the occasional actions of the mechanicals within the department, i.e – social media posts, periodic emails, etc. So before jumping into another activity, first get familiar with the overall business goals your team is tasked to achieving, beyond the primary functions of increase in revenue or acquisition of new users, but actionable next steps and the success indicators from your KPIs.

Developing actionable next steps from your KPIs, means breaking them down into specific action points that you can focus on in the short term. Most of the time, this requires a broader team effort, even outside of the marketing department, which would require continuous reviews as to reach common ground with the overall business. This also helps funnel specific expectations of your team on paper, in order to shore up resources where need be.

Typically, your marketing goals would be based on these key areas

· Awareness – Web, social media Traffic

· Acquisition – Conversion, Lead Generation

· Engagement – Nurture,

However, depending on the nature of the business, additional funnels such as relationship management and retention exists.

How to set proper goals

As I mentioned earlier, setting proper goals would require a broader team input, but these are actionable efforts that can kick start the process

1. Reviewing current efforts

o Identify your current project baselines such as marketing reporting metrics, acquisition, sale numbers, etc, and set a realistic goal of 10% month on month increase – this could be greater based on companies capacity.

2. Identify current challenges

o Once current marketing efforts have been reported, this would give proper direction on what opportunities for improvements exists.

3. Proffer new solutions

o Getting the right solutions would require prioritizing ideas gotten out from the challenges identified into, "How, Now and WOW" approach, that segments ideas of the future and immediate actionable tasks

This can be done through brainstorming sessions using design thinking as an anchor.

These are simple ideas to help you on your next step to meeting your goals and increasing productivity within your marketing department, but if you need any help, do not hesitate to let me know in the link below.

Good luck