How can you stay focused on your marketing goals without getting distracted?

Not into video? See text version below.

The executive summary:

• If you want to reach your goals/achieve your vision – you need to remain focused and avoid distractions (squirrel!)
• What is one key “number” for your business that you can track so that you always know you’re on course?
• Turn it into a question to help guide your decisions: will what you’re thinking about doing make that number better?

If you want to reach your goals and achieve your long term vision, you need to maintain focus.

It’s really easy to get distracted by new technology, new ideas or other bright shiny objects.

Sometimes these are pure distractions.

But often, they seem like a good idea at the time…until you realize later that you’ve wandered off track.

How do you stay clear and focused in that moment of decision?

Peter Drucker was a famous business and management consultant. (Want a quick business education? Google “Peter Drucker quotes.”)

His observation?

What’s measured, improves.

~ Peter Drucker

This makes sense – because when we measure something, we pay attention to it.

When I first started measuring my time by recording everything I do in half hour increments, I immediately started to get more done. Not because I was making changes – just because I became mindful of what I was doing.

In business lingo, these are called KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

KPIs are simply a way of measuring what’s important in your business.

In order to measure something, you need a number to track.

Here are some numbers you could measure and track to determine whether or not your marketing is paying off:

• Revenue or profit
• Clients
• Leads
• List size or number of subscribers
• Sales

Can you select ONE measurement that links directly to the health of your business?

Is there a single measurement that indicates whether or not you’re on track? One key number that, if you get that one right, everything else falls into place?

For example – for a lot of people, it’s leads or appointments. They know that as long as they talk to X number of potential clients in a given week, they’ll be on track to make their numbers.

For you it might be leads too. Or maybe it’s webinar attendees, or sales, or subscribers to your email list. Or maybe you want to focus directly on the money.

For my husband, who sells web design services, it’s the number of website projects he has on the go at any one time. He knows that if he’s within a certain range, the money will look after itself.

Once you’ve picked something to measure, you can turn it into a guiding question

If I do this (whatever “this” is) – will it get me more leads? (Or more subscribers? Or more website projects? Or more income?)

For an Olympic rowing team, the guiding question was:

Will it make the boat go faster?

Your guiding question makes decision making easier

Whenever you’re faced with a decision, you simply ask your equivalent of will this make my boat go faster?

For the Olympic team this meant “yes” for rowing practice…and “no” for going to the pub. (And ultimately led to a gold medal.)

For you, it might mean “yes” to attending that networking event (at the pub?)…and “no” for social media. (Or vice versa.)

What’s YOUR guiding question?