Last week, an entrepreneur asked me a question that you may have asked yourself. They wanted to know, “how do I measure my marketing team talent?”
It is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to struggle with marketing questions. Understanding whether or not their marketing is working, and evaluating the talent on their marketing team can be difficult.
I have already discussed how to make a great marking hire for your startup on this blog, but I want to take another shot at answering this question more specifically.
Defining Your North Star
First things first, do you know what you actually want your marketing team to accomplish? What business goal are you expecting them to help you achieve?
If you don’t know what you want your marketing team to achieve, how will you ever know if they are actually doing their job? Even more, how will you ever go about hiring the right people to fill the right skill sets?
As business owners and entrepreneurs, marketing frequently falls outside of our wheelhouse. In fact, many entrepreneurs that I talk to tend to view marketing as a ‘soft skill.’
Technically this shouldn’t be accurate, but the unfortunate truth is that most marketing teams simply don’t produce results. You have a right to skeptical. It was under this premise (and desire to combat it) that I wrote my book, the 10x Marketing Formula.
The truth is that most marketing teams are focused on tactics and not results. They are sending emails and posting blog posts because that is what they are supposed to do, not because they are executing against any sort of strategy.
This could be describing your team, and if you aren’t 100% sure about what you want them to accomplish, then that’s on you just as much as it’s on them.
You’re in charge here. It is up to you to define the north star.
A lot of times we fail to do just that. Just like they execute certain marketing tactics because they think they should, entrepreneurs frequently have marketing teams because they think they should.
But, what do you want them to accomplish, specifically?
Do they have the resources they need to get there?
Have you hired the right talent to accomplish that goal?
Defining your north star is the first step towards marketing results.
Make Them Document Their Strategy
A valuable exercise that could help you get your marketing team back on the right track, or help you answer the question “how do I measure my marketing team’s talent” is to develop a written marketing strategy.
Believe me, I am not talking about a traditional marketing plan (they’re crap). I am talking about a simple one-page document that outlines the business goal (or goals) that your marketing team is trying to influence.
You don’t want this to be a tactical document. What I mean by that is that it should not spend a lot of time outlining specific tactics that your team will use. Aside from a brief list of tactics or a few bullet points, this document should not go in-depth on any sort of specific deliverables like email or social media.
Done correctly, this document will provide an in-depth answer to the question: “what are we trying to accomplish,” and not “what marketing tactics are we going to use.”
Think of this as a way to force you and your marketing team to have the right conversations. It will force you to define your north star, and it will require your team to think about and tell you, how they are going to help you reach it.
Define Your One Metric That Matters
One of the problems that entrepreneurs often have when it comes to evaluating their marketing teams is understanding the metrics that they are providing us with.
It isn’t necessarily that they are hard to understand. More so, it’s hard to tell if they really matter.
Do you really care how many Twitter followers you have?
Facebook likes?
Email addresses?
The current marketing landscape is jam-packed with data about your business. Access to data isn’t the problem, in fact, there is probably too much of it. Any time you, or your marketing team, wants to find a metric that is moving up and to the right, they probably can.
This is precisely why you need to define the one KPI that matters most to you. When you measure your marketing success based on the data available, you miss the real opportunity to connect your KPIs to business goals. Instead, you need to measure your marketing success with data that is relevant.
Once you have your north star, find one metric that you can look at on a weekly basis to determine if you are reaching it. THIS is your one metric that matters.
Now, build your meetings and one-on-ones around this metric, and you’ll have a clear answer to your questions about your team’s talent in no time.