Why Your Marketing Goals May be Setting You Up For Failure (And What To Do About It)

想象一下，您正在制定一年的数字营销计划。

以下哪个目标听起来实际上会激励您的团队成功执行计划？

1. “我们需要在今年增加公司的收入。这意味着我们需要推动更多的潜在客户。”
2. “We need to generate 20% more revenue this year. Based on that projection, we will need 20% more leads. We project that we will need 40% more visitors to the website this year, since we do not project the same conversion rate with more traffic.”

这是我采访汤姆·夏皮罗（Tom Shapiro）首席执行官汤姆·夏皮罗（Tom Shapiro）的主要问题Stratabeat和新书的作者Rethink Your Marketing。Tom wanted to share the lessons he has learned from working on digital marketing with hundreds of companies over the past 20 years.

In the book，他讨论了公司应调查的7个地方，他们想突破当前的收入上限以释放新的增长。他鼓励营销人员重新考虑他们的受众，沟通和说服力，营销组合，指标，收入模型和未来行业增长。

But the first chapter he wrote was ongoal setting。He frequently found that marketers would fail to grow the business because they set the wrong goals or had the wrong goal management framework in the first place. So I interviewed him to learn what was going wrong, and how to fix it.

And by the way, in the question above, the second goal setting method is far more likely to encourage goal achievement. He digs into goal-setting strategies that marketers can use to motivate the team.

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Table of Contents

1. Why Your Current Goal Setting Strategies Let You Down
2. 您将如何知道您设定了错误的目标
3. When You Need a SMART Goal Versus a Stretch Goal
4. Why 3 Goals Is the Ideal Number
5. The Neuroscience of Goals

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Why Your Current Goal Setting Strategies Let You Down

Kevin (K):Do you more commonly see that people set too many goals or too few goals?

汤姆（T）：It is far more common for marketers to not set enough goals, and for the goals to be too vague.Vagueness is a growth killer.

If you have well-defined, specific goals, everybody feels empowered and energized. They will put all their resources into achieving those goals. Typically, when we meet with a client at Stratabeat, the very first conversation we have centers around goals. We have to know the goals in order to understand what the strategies need to be.

通常，我们会问：“您的营销目标是什么？”反应可能是“哦，我们需要增加收入”或“我们需要增加此新产品的销售额”或“我们希望增加该地理区域的销售额”。太模糊了。如果我们将销售额增加1％，那是巨大的成功吗？通常，他们说“当然不是！”那么，目标到底是什么？

Driving marketing leaders towards a specific definition of success is really hard, because many will hesitate. I believe it happens because people are risk averse. If you work at a mid-size or Fortune 500 company, you don’t want to lose your job. So, how do you make sure that you keep your job? You make sure that nobody can pinpoint failure to your efforts. When you set vague goals, nobody can blame you for missing them! We see that a lot. It is challenging. We press and press, and even then companies may be unwilling to be specific with goals. We still need to press.

Sometimes, you come across a company with too many goals. They have goals for every KPI imaginable. So we say, “If you hit your goals for KPI X, Y and Z, would you really care if you missed your goals for A, B and C? Is it really relevant?”

Typically, they have not thought through their goals to that level, and therefore we find it really helpful to go through a prioritization process with clients. So, not only do you have goals established, but you have them prioritized clearly, as well.

K:当营销人员没有设定目标时，他们就不会失败。这听起来很不错！稍后再回来咬人吗？

T：它确实回来咬人。对于执行管理团队而言，这可能并不明显，但是它会重新获得他们。

Goals compel action. If you break them down into achievable SMART goals as stepping stones to achieve the larger goals, you can achieve tremendous growth. If you are very vague about everything, and if you are unwilling to commit to specific goals and actively track them using a营销仪表板, it makes it hard to leverage all of your resources and maximize the power of your resources towards achieving the goals.

Here’s the thing- if you want to unleash growth, you need to go bold and go big. You need to be very clear about what you are trying to achieve. Just trying to tinker around the edges doesn’t work. I have seen it over and over. It might seem like it is beneficial to the employee to keep things vague, but it is really to their advantage to be held accountable. Then, they have the opportunity to achieve amazing success, blast through their goals and receive credit for it.

您将如何知道您设定了错误的目标

K:So when do marketers learn that they probably should have set different goals? Is it a year in the future at the next annual review?

T：There is a whole other part of goal management- tracking, reporting, and analysis. You want to have multiple layers of data available at your fingertips that you can review consistently.You want to have a dashboardthat you can reference on a daily or near-daily basis. You want to do analysis on a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis. It all depends on what level of goals you are talking about.

For example, a marketing department may have overarching goals like increasing revenue by 15% within 6 months. Then, you can break that down so that progress is being reviewed on a weekly or monthly basis. At Stratabeat, we have weekly, monthly and yearly goals. The cadence of reviewing your goals depends on the timeframe for those goals.

K:What are some common signs that the team is being handicapped by setting the wrong goals?

T：Goals need to have the proper infrastructure in place. You need to have the right tools, technology and timeframe. You also need the right staff and resources. And the budget needs to be sufficient to support the goals.

You also have to be careful about tinkering at the top. Let’s say you are a midsize company, and the entrepreneur is still the CEO. We often find that the entrepreneur-CEO will have an entrepreneurial mindset rather than an execution mindset. They love new things all the time. They bring up new ideas every month or every quarter. The company’s goals change every quarter or every 6 months.

This demoralizes the team. You set doubts in minds, because when you come up with a new goal, they don’t know whether to take it seriously. They don’t put the same level of effort in. Looking at the infrastructure is important, but also the leadership needs to stick to the goals like glue.

“The more that executives shift goals or show lack of commitment, everybody notices. It really derails goal achievement.”

When You Need a SMART Goal Versus a Stretch Goal

K:What is the difference between SMART and stretch goals? What do people get wrong when they just set SMART goals?

T：明智的目标很棒。对于任何不熟悉的人来说，一个明智的目标是特定，可衡量，可实现，相关和时间限制的目标（它有一个截止日期）。

If you want to achieve breakthrough success, unleash revenue growth or 10x something, though, that is not a time for a SMART goal. SMART goals are great if you want to achieve smaller goals or goals that build up to larger goals.

在他的书中Smarter Faster Better，查尔斯·杜希格（Charles Duhigg）指出了一个关于日本建立革命性新“子弹列车”努力的启发性故事。当通用电气的前首席执行官杰克·韦尔奇（Jack Welch）前往日本时，他了解到了火车的创建，该火车的时间为120英里 /小时。当子弹列车首次构思时，工程师认为它将以75英里 /小时的速度最大化。该项目的负责人说：“这还不够。您将需要找到突破的方法。”

If you were using SMART goals, the project leader would have said, “Okay, that is achievable. Which SMART goals will help us achieve that?” And they probably would have achieved it.

与一段目标,你不知道你将如何chieve it yet. You know what you are aspiring towards. You start by breaking it down into chunks or components. Then, you set SMART goals for each component. As you progress towards that larger, more ambitious goal, you are more likely to achieve it. As Duhigg explains in his book, you can use SMART goals as enablers for stretch goals.

为什么三个目标是理想的数字

K:I know that you feel three goals is the ideal number. How did you realize that?

T：I started by thinking, “The fewer goals you have, the more you can focus. The more you focus, the more energy you can apply towards a few important goals. Therefore, it is more likely that you achieve these goals.”

The more that I read about goal theory and goal management, the more that I realized that this is common among high achievers. Journalists often asked Steve Jobs about focus, because when he came back to Apple, the first thing he did was eliminate products. He eliminated most of their products, in fact. He narrowed it down to a select few.

When interviewed, Jobs said that people get focus all wrong. It is not about what you are focused on accomplishing, it is about the hundreds or thousands of things that you are going to say ‘no’ to. Few people are good at saying ‘no’ to many options. Steve would force teams to narrow it down to three goals.

当马克·帕克（Mark Parker）接任耐克（Nike）首席执行官时，史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）呼吁祝贺他。他问史蒂夫是否有任何建议。史蒂夫最初说：“哦，不，目前没有建议。”但是他说：“好吧，只有一件事。耐克是世界上最好的产品。您之后渴望的产品。但是你也很废话。只是摆脱糟糕的东西，专注于好东西。”马克在等待笑声。史蒂夫没有笑。

If you look at Warren Buffett’s ideas for goals setting, he recommends that you set 25 goals to start. Then, you choose your top 5 highest priorities from those 25. Then you delete the other 20. So you don’t have a long to-do list with 5 priorities. You delete the other 20 and stop thinking about them. Narrowing focus helps you achieve more.

Jim Collins, the author ofGood to Great, says that if you have more than 3 priorities, you have 0 priorities.

K:Do you have any advice or formula for linking the three goals? Or is it customized for each individual situation?

T：在每种情况下都必须定制目标。但是目标本身并不意味着什么。您还需要制定支持这些目标的策略。您需要一个框架来执行策略。一些营销团队有3个人，有30人有30人，而另一些则有300人。您必须在每种情况下自定义目标。

If you take on a 10x goal, your strategies need to be equally ambitious. If you say that your annual goal is to grow organic traffic by 20%, you will not need strategies as ambitious.

例如，我们有一个确实想进行入站营销来产生潜在客户的客户。他们对潜在客户产生非常具体的目标。这是挑战 - 他们需要立即引导潜在客户。他们需要在一个月内向投资者证明他们的营销努力导致了增长。这是非常短的皮带。但是，然后他们开始无休止地谈论入站营销。

入站营销是惊人的，但这是长期的。如果您今天需要潜在客户，则不想开始进行入站并期望立即结果。对于他们来说，定制策略意味着我们需要做很多付费媒体。这样，我们可以立即获得潜在客户。但是，他们只希望我们进行入站营销。我们最终不得不与他们分开，因为他们不明白该策略需要直接导致您的目标实现。即使您有明确的目标，如果策略没有意义，您仍在为失败而准备自己。

The Neuroscience of Goals

K:Any other keys to goal achievement?

T：Let me point out some research fromHeidi Grant Halvorson。她指的是反馈回路as a big factor in goal achievement. You need to have a feedback loop with data coming back to team members so they know how much further they need to go. They need to know the delta between where they are currently and where they need to be at the finish line.

This ties into neuroscience because the brain actually jumps into action and throws resources at this discrepancy. If your goal is 100 leads a week and you are generating 80 leads a week, you know that you are 20 leads away. By having this data at your fingertips, it organically triggers the brain to throw more energy at the problem. The brain automatically tries to do deeper thinking to solve the problem and overcome that delta. Without the frequent cadence of seeing the data, analyzing the data, and figuring out next steps, it is very hard to achieve your goals.

Next Steps

If you want to create goals within Databox, you canset goals这里。可以将它们设置在任何驱动您的业务和任何时间范围的特定指标上。我们建议每月目标。

Want to check out the full book? Head over to Amazon to read Rethink Your Marketing. Or, download the Goal Achievement Workbook to start setting goals now.