Managing Those Unrealistic Goals/Expectations

Welcome back to another Monday! This week we've got your second-to-last marketing hack to help you through your team’s marketing budget planning! Sometimes some of the most straightforward concepts can, in reality, be the most complex.

What I’ve come to love most about marketing and analytics is that everything is measurable. We can tie data points to goals and use figures to help build something better for our businesses. There is a certain beauty to the mathematics of it all. However, even with the practical foundations set, we can still hit stumbling blocks when it comes to building our strategies and matching them to our annual budgets. One of the biggest drivers I’ve found that causes this friction is often a misalignment of goals and expectations.?

Listen to the needs of the teams/clients you are working with.?

Seems simple right? Listening can feel like a forgone conclusion but I've been surprised throughout my career how easy it can be to listen without really hearing. The goal is to listen so we can understand and build something that is not only useful but becomes an essential element of our team's success. To do that we have to truly listen to what is being said and also what is not being said out loud - find the subtext that is pulling the threads together.

• Dig into the pain - Where there are pain points there are opportunities to better understand your business and how to better serve the needs of your team/client. Sometimes we have to dig deeper into the underlying pain points that are driving strategy to get beyond the surface-level needs. Surface level marketing strategies are a bandaid. The most impactful marketing that has a long-reaching impact comes from digging into the pain points to more clearly determine the drivers and problems you need to be solving.??

• Do you need a hammer, a screwdriver, or a drill? Tooling matters. - Based on the goals, are you using the right tool to accomplish the goal? We want to ensure that we are setting up the best strategy that can solve the problem at hand. In digital marketing, we have so many tools at our disposal with more tools and platforms emerging every quarter. The fact is, not every single tool needs to be part of your marketing plan. Not every tool should either. Determine which tool(s) you need to best reach your operational objectives and utilize those as foundational elements of your marketing arsenal.?

• Are the goals in alignment? - This goes hand in hand with tooling but happens often enough to warrant a moment of our time. I have seen marketing fail, or appear to fail, when the solution and plans work according to the plan of the marketing team but don’t meet the goals of the client. Simple as it may seem, we need to make sure what we produce is something that will be helpful and useful in the end to move the needle on their business goals.
• Education - A big part of what we do as marketers is continually learning and educating not only ourselves on the changes within our field but also our teams and clients so we can all best understand how our work is going to move the needle for our goals.?The most unrealistic expectations I've seen regarding marketing initiatives have come from a lack of knowledge. Typically this happens when they don’t understand how a solution functions. For example, if you have the best SEO strategy your team is implementing but your client is thinking of it like PPC/SEM, which is a much faster demand generation channel, your marketing isn’t going to hit their targets.

Communicate clearly what can be done and agree on the terms

Setting expectations isn't a one-time thing. We are continuously doing this throughout our working relationships. Get comfortable with being slightly uncomfortable at times when level setting. We can be realistic and still be compassionate, scrappy, and creative. Here are my four tips on communicating expectations and goals with your teams/clients that have served me well.

• Be Honest - In marketing sometimes we want to be able to say yes to some harder asks because we want to make our clients/teams happy. But, we know we sadly don’t live in a world where we can make everyone happy. We didn’t go to Hogwarts, if you did this Muggle is insanely jealous, we can’t just make the magic happen.? Sometimes this means you have to dole out some harsh truths (as compassionately as possible - obviously.)??Sometimes honest conversion will mean you have to pivot or change the goals to fit a budget or it can be a driver for your teams/clients to go back to their boards to approve a budget that will empower you to reach growth goals.For example, if you’re building a marketing plan where the average cost metric has historically been $100/lead and the client then tells you they expect $25/lead in the coming year it would behoove you to take a pause and have a sold conversation as to why they expect such a dramatic drop in cost and what their realistic expectations of the quality outputs would be. I’m not going to lie and tell you it will be an easy conversation. I’ve had this exact conversation, it was painful- nobody I know gets too giddy telling their client they have to choose sometimes between cheap and quality leads. But, through the pain, there was an opportunity to educate and better understand the business needs.

• Be Transparent - The best part of demand generation/digital media is the numbers. It’s also easy to hide behind them. Explain how and why you’re building strategies. More often than not we are working alongside smart people who may not understand exactly what it is we do but being able to relate the why of what we are doing and how it impacts them can make a world of a difference.?

• Be Present - Be the person they know they can come to with their marketing questions. Sometimes that might mean you say ‘let me look into that for you’ and follow up in a business day or two. It’s okay to not know everything, things move very fast in this space. The world will not end if you don't have all the answers. It's not okay to make stuff up though. Most reasonable people would prefer you to look into it than to give them fluff. This allows you an opportunity to set working boundaries/ SLAs on what the realistic expectations of your communications should be. Be present, but also be realistic with your timelines. Please set boundaries so you can keep to your SLAs and keep your sanity.
• Be Accountable - Hold both yourself and the person(s) you are working with accountable to the agreed-upon terms (circling back to your agreed-upon terms does not make you a jerk as long as you do so with kindness - I see you overthinkers.)? As we discussed in Data Delima - make sure you have a proper amount of time to make data-driven decisions and weave those timelines into your media plan.? Setting realistic timelines are essential to realistic goal and expectation setting.

I'll be back next week for my final marketing hack to help you better plan your marketing in 2024!

Have a great week ahead!

Rita