Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Good heads of marketing are always looking for ways to make their team perform better. But, with no shortage of things to do, layering on more – more planning, more training, more anything – can make any CMO feel a little guilty. What to do?
One solution is to seize on resolution season. Create a quick-win New Year’s resolution for your team. By making it small and completing in January, your team can enter the year a little bit smarter and more energized. Here are five easy resolution ideas you can use.
Give Your Marketing Program an Annual Performance Review – You give your people an annual performance review, right? How about your overall marketing program. Would you give it a raise? A promotion? Sometimes we’re so busy measuring individual marketing efforts we fail to see the big picture. So step back from that redwood and take a look at the whole grove. Just for fun, rank your marketing program (or department) using the same system you use for giving annual performance reviews. Share the results and discuss.
Be the Buyer for a Day – I’ve written about this before. Spend a day acting like someone buying your product, both from your company and your top two competitors. Do the product research. Fill out the forms. Sign up for the demos. Call the published sales phone numbers. This exercise takes no prep and you can find out how you stack up. Plus, it’s a lot of fun and gets people motivated.
Create Some Top Ten Lists – Do you know your top ten most read blog posts for the last year? How about your most shared? Or your top performing eBooks? Freshen up your weekly team meeting by sharing some top ten lists. Have some fun with it, then discuss how you can create more assets that are like your top fives.
Steal Two Great Ideas – As good as you may be, you can’t have all the good ideas. As I am wont to say, it’s not the job of a CMO to have all the great ideas, just to recognize them. So go outside your four walls and steal a few. (It’s okay, everyone does it.) Have each member of your team bring their favorite to your weekly meeting, then pick one to purloin implement. If you need some inspiration, I highly recommend Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon.
Set Professional Development Plans – Your marketing is only as good as your people. How are you improving them? I like to set a personal development goal for each employee. Make it straightforward and actionable. Need to become a better public speaker? When are you taking Decker training? Want to be seen as an SEO guru? When are you giving the talk to the local meetup? Better yet, when is your book coming out? Make sure everyone one your team (including you) has a goal and an action plan.
So, don’t wait. January was named for the Roman god Janus, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. Make sure you spend this week looking backward, reflecting on what you could have done better in 2015, and set a small “January resolution” to get your team off on the right foot in the new year.
Care to share your own 2016 marketing resolution? Have another idea to share? Let me know.
Want to learn even more about marketing?