How to Set up Your Marketing Strategy for Greater Success

We’re coming into the home stretch of the year, and it’s time to evaluate how your marketing efforts have been going this year. For a lot of marketing directors, it’s a stressful activity because it forces you to realize how big that final push is going to be.

But there’s a way to frontload your planning so that you can accomplish your goals much easier. Want to set up your marketing efforts for greater success? Here’s what we do.

Find the Right Process

Our agency is powered by EOS®. EOS—the Entrepreneurial Operating System®—is a set of simple tools and processes that help any organization gain traction and achieve their goals. We’ve seen huge success with it in our company, and because of that we translate many aspects of EOS into our process with our clients. It has tremendous power to GSD (Get Stuff Done) and stay on track.

Identify Your Goals and Roadblocks

What’s the marketing issue you need to solve? Don’t initiate any marketing campaign until you know exactly what your issues are. Do you need more visitors, leads, or opportunities? Your challenges should guide your yearly and quarterly marketing goals. Then, out of your goals, you should identify what your gaps are and the roadblocks in your way.

Give Yourself Time

No matter how determined you are, you’ll tend to get off track and lose focus after 90 days. People simply don’t naturally work in windows larger than that. So when it comes to yearly goals and extended plans and campaigns, break them up into 90-day sprints (EOS calls them “rocks”). Each quarterly rock should lead you toward accomplishing your yearly marketing goals (and company goals).

Do you have a marketing &
sales service level agreement (SLA)?

download our FREE template

Gain alignment with the key people on your team, define the timeline and what the deliverables look like, and keep it reasonable within the time frame (don’t forget you have your day-to-day work to do too!). Keep rocks to a minimum—no more than 3-7 at the company level, and no more than one or two for any individual.

Double the Amount of Time You Think It Will Take

It’s incredibly tempting to underestimate the time it will take to accomplish your rocks. There’s pressure to deliver, and time is money—especially when a rock doesn’t directly generate revenue. But you’re guaranteed to hit bumps in the road. Snafus always occur, especially if you’re doing something new.

Play it safe. Don’t promise and then fail to deliver. Make sure you give yourself extra time—at least 20% more than you expect it’ll take.

Also, break your rock down into manageable tasks so you can identify exactly what you need to do to successfully accomplish your rock. Identify your issues and gaps, prioritize, then attack just one task at a time. Define the issue your rock is solving, and identify who needs to help, when things need to be completed, and how you’ll gauge if you’re on track.

This is the process we follow, and it works! We’re accomplishing more goals every year—and you can too. Want more details on how EOS gives you more marketing traction? Let’s talk!