Yesterday, I talked about the power of “arbitrary goals“. I thought I’d expand on it a bit more to make it practical.
Your goals could be at least one of two things: outcome or input-focused.
Examples of outcome-focused goals include revenue targets, profit, number of clients, number of leads, or even selling a new service at least once.
Examples of input-focused goals include writing one blog post per month, recording one podcast episode per week, reaching out to one person each day, or any number of other activities.
Another term for these goals might be leading and lagging indicators.
By setting goals for leading indicators, such as the activities you control, you should achieve some level of lagging indicators as a result.
And that’s how you want to think about your marketing, too. Inputs and outputs. Like a machine or an ecosystem.
Figure out what inputs you need to make to achieve a specific result. If something doesn’t work, try new inputs or change the variables until something works.
When you set targets for both inputs and outputs, it forces you to look at your marketing as a system of parts that make up a whole.
You can still manage the strategy, direction, and creative execution of those parts, but having targets forces you to behave in a way most likely to get a desired result.
Because at the end of the day, it’s the results that matter most.