The Min Max Rule For Evaluating Marketing Performance

Getting results in marketing is hard.

Evaluating success and failure is even harder.

The Min Max Rule is a useful way to think about how you manage expectations and evaluate progress.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about one of the hardest parts of marketing, which is results. I'm not talking about getting the results. I'm talking about dealing with the results that you get. Because once you get the results, it's over. You can't change them. You have the results that you have. And that's a big problem for two reasons. One, hopefully the results are good. But if they're not, people will look at them and judge them based on arbitrary numbers, arbitrary targets and goals. For example, if you run a campaign that has a goal of achieving 50 new leads, and your campaign only gets 35 leads, is that success or is that a failure? Did you hit the target or did you miss it? I think this is a big problem because many people don't really understand how marketing works, that you can't just make up a goal and then hope to hit it. And that 35 leads is still progress. That's success in my book. That's 35 leads we didn't have before. And this is a huge challenge from a senior leadership perspective that the goals that you have for your campaigns often aren't set by you. And if they are, they're often not set using historical data because most of what we do in marketing is new. You're launching a new product line, you're testing a new channel, you're working with new partners, you're going after a new segment of the market. A lot of things are new and therefore exploratory. You don't have the historical data or understanding or knowledge to properly project and estimate what's going to happen. That means that either your targets are not being set by you and therefore they're completely unrealistic. Or even if you are able to speak into your targets, you really don't have a way to know what the result will be. It's very hard to guess. It's kind of like counting the number of jelly beans in a jar. Yeah, you might get close, but really nobody has a clue. And we're all just taking a wild guess and hoping to get close to the right answer. That's often how it feels like when it comes to setting goals and targets in marketing. So today I want to share with you a framework that is really helpful to mitigate this problem, to make it easier and safer and more enjoyable. And it's called the Min Max framework. And I teach this in my coaching group, and we cover it a lot and frequently because it has so many applications, and I'll tell you some of those at the end. But first, let's talk about what it is. I've already told you a little bit about the problem with setting goals and targets and marketing for campaigns specifically, but it applies to so many things that often our projections, our estimates are wrong. And the other challenge of that is that when the target is not hit, then we feel bad. And then senior leadership sees it as a failure as well. And so you get a lot of pressure, both from above and from within, about why did we not hit our target? And how can we hit this arbitrary, ambiguous, unrealistic target next time? And a side note from this is when you miss a target, often the next target gets bigger and more ridiculous because we have to quote unquote make up for the lost time or for being behind now. And this problem becomes much worse, but I digress. How do we combat this? How do we set realistic targets when we don't have the data, when we don't have the experience or the knowledge to understand what the number should be? This is where min-max thrives. Here's how it works. Rather than having a single number that you're trying to hit, we come up with a min and a max, a minimum and a maximum. You can think of this like the floor and the ceiling. The minimum is what is the minimum level of acceptable performance in your campaign when all is said and done and the campaign is over, what outcome, what result would you have to have achieved that makes it worth it? You can kind of think of this like break-even, that maybe you're not thrilled about how the campaign went, but at least you can say with confidence, it was a success, it paid for itself at a minimum. At a maximum, we can define what is the highest hopes that we have for this campaign. If everything goes right, what does that look like? And so rather than having a number that we're trying to hit, we can have this gradient from the minimum to the maximum. And that not only makes your target much bigger, if you think about archery and trying to shoot an arrow at a target, we just made the target a lot bigger because now you have a min and a max, and you have a much higher chance of getting the arrow onto the target. That's the first goal here. The second goal is much of marketing being exploratory, is we need to get the data. We need to figure out how things are going. And so having a gradient of min to max allows you to have a lot of room for error in your judgment, in your expectations. And this further helps you when you communicate the performance of the campaign, both during it launching and running and after it's over, to say, here's what we thought, and here's where we were wrong about those expectations. But look, we still got the arrow on the map. This is huge. And it will dramatically change how you think about campaigns, how you communicate the performance of them, and how you manage your feelings and expectations for yourself about running campaigns. So let me give you a really practical example here. Let's come up with an arbitrary campaign that we're launching and say that our minimum, what is the minimum level of acceptable performance? Let's say it's 20 leads. We need at least 20 leads from this campaign to justify running this campaign, to justify the spend and the time and the energy of launching this campaign. In addition, you can add other metrics here. So we're gonna add that we also need to have at least 20,000 new web visitors to our website. Otherwise, this campaign is not successful. It's not worth the time and the investment. You can keep adding more metrics here, but for sake of simplicity, I'm gonna stop there. So 20 new leads and 20,000 web visitors. Those are our metrics for the minimum level of performance. Now let's think about the maximum, the best case. If everything goes right, what does that look like? And instead of 20 leads, we could say 50 leads is our big dream, our high goal for leads. And for web traffic, instead of 20,000 as a minimum, we might say 40,000 web visitors would be tremendous for us. I think about this not just vertically from the minimum to the maximum, but also horizontally as columns, that if you create columns for each metric here, leads, web visitors, et cetera, then you can see the progress that you're making and where you're at. And as the campaign keeps moving forward, hopefully each of these metrics keeps going up and up and up. But if at any point you don't meet the minimum level, then you know there's a problem. You need to lean in and take corrective action. But hopefully you can see here that this gives you a lot more room to understand the different variables of the campaign. That perhaps at the end of the campaign, we've gotten near our max for website traffic. Maybe we got 35,000, 38,000 website visitors, and we got 30 leads. That's a much better story to tell. And it gives you a lot more insight than just arbitrarily having some goal of saying 50 leads, and we only got 30 or 35 leads. So it's really important to one have a more holistic view of success than an arbitrary, unrealistic number or target. But two, to give yourself room for error, especially when doing something new: a new channel, a new product line, a new segment, whatever it is. There's so much new and unknowns about the marketing that we do. And so the min max allows you that threshold, that area to not only achieve success, because I think much of marketing is successful, even if we don't think it is, but also to communicate and defend that success and to show the success, the progress that you're making. But let me give you one more way to use the min-max because once you hear this, I think you'll see many other use cases for min-max. And that is conversations with your CEO, with your manager, or even in a job interview. In any experience, it's helpful to use Min Max to say, what is my minimum that I would be happy with in the worst case? And so let's talk about a job interview, for example. The minimum would be that I present my case clearly, articulately, and successfully, and that I learn more about the job and the position so that I can follow up in a way that's intelligent and professional and put my best foot forward. That would be my minimum. In other words, it would be a failure if I trip over myself, spill coffee over myself, and stumble over my words. At a maximum, what does success look like if everything goes right? Well, in a job interview, I would connect with the interviewer really well. I would ask powerful questions, I would have really good answers, and I would feel confident at the end that I'm a great fit and could do well in this role. So now when the interview is over, you can evaluate your performance, just like the campaign, on the min and max. You no longer have this ambiguity about was it good and was it bad, and you're not relegated to just how you felt about it. You have tangible metrics and a gradient to score them on with the min and max. Did I answer these questions well? And where do I fall within my min and max of the different criteria that I designed for myself? This is so helpful in how we think about performance, how we manage and communicate that performance, and truly how we manage our expectations for ourselves and our feelings about the performance that we're getting. Use the min and max wherever you can. I think, at a minimum, you should always consider this framework and apply it. And at a maximum, use it in every scenario whenever you need to evaluate the performance of something.