Marketing Habits

Measuring marketing is challenging. Companies tend to go back and forth. They’re either too far in the weeds, they’re measuring these little details that don’t really matter and people just get bored with them, and it’s a lot of work. Or they’re measuring the ultimate goal, like revenue growth. And people lose interest there too, because the linkage to that work they’re doing today or this week or this month, doesn’t show up in the quarterly revenue results. So, the magic of metrics in marketing is to find that that middle ground between the work you’re doing every day and the ultimate goal of marketing.

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, which is a great read, had an idea that I really liked to apply to this, and I wanted to talk it through. He talks about leading and lagging indicators. 

Lagging Indicators
And when it comes to habits, lagging indicators are more like that revenue goal. They are the result– what happens after you do all the work, after you do your habits for a long time. That’s the outcome, right? So, if we have our effective campaigns and we execute on this program and that program, the end of the day, if it has the effect we want, we’re gonna see revenue go up. The challenge with that, as I said, is that if the lagging indicator is too far detached or too far away temporarily from what you’re doing every day you’re not gonna have any benefit of focusing on that. So it’s really important to pick a result, a lagging indicator that is closely linked with the work you’re doing every day in your marketing.

Leading Indicators
And on the leading indicators. Time aside, these are the things that you’re doing now as a leading indicator of that long-term success, revenue growth, in our example and leading indicators are habits from the book. He talks about the power, the amazing power of a strong habit and consistent habit, and the power of time, right? The water etching, the, the rocks over thousands of years, that kind of an effect. So here, the magic is for you to pick, habits for your marketing team, the tactics, the things they’re doing every day or every week, and establish a strong cadence and a consistency that is tied to that lagging indicator so that your team can be motivated and stick with the effort to do that daily work because they know if they keep it up, it will pay off with a lagging indicator in the long term.

So, check out Atomic Habits, awesome. Read and apply this idea to your marketing and put some habits in place for your team and for you as a manager, and it will pay off for you in the long run.