That’s the most important question you can ask of your marketing.
It isn’t a throwaway or something trite, it is simply the single most important question to ask.
Here’s why:
If you don’t know where you are trying to get and what you are trying to achieve, you will have absolutely no way of understanding if your marketing efforts are successful or not successful.
How can you understand what your measurements should look like?
1. Have a destination in mind:
This seems obvious, but it is often easy to get overwhelmed when you are in the heat of a discussion or in the middle of a planning session. Or, just when you are stuck.
So know where you are trying to get to and make sure that you are pointed towards that.
2. Set measurable goals:
How often does it occur that you are sitting in a planning meeting that ends with someone going: “well, we just want to grow” or “we just want to raise more money.”
I bet pretty often.
The challenge is that if you just say something like that, it can be pretty meaningless.
If you make a dollar more, you have grown.
If you raise another dollar, you have raised more money.
So make sure you are looking at measurable things.
3. Measure and adjust:
Your aim may not be true the first time.
But that doesn’t mean you have lost.
It only means that you need to look at what you have done, see what worked and what didn’t and adjust course.