Activities vs. Outcomes: Which One Matters?

 In marketing, you can spend a lot of time doing activities. But what really matters are the outcomes. The question is…will doing the right activities lead to the desired outcomes? Let’s talk about it. 

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about activities and outcomes. This is something that almost every marketing director I coach is confused about or gets backwards. And so I want to set the record straight for you on activities versus outcomes. And when you understand this, everything you do in marketing becomes a lot easier and a lot simpler and a lot more clear. So there are two sides to the equation. There are activities, things that you do, and there are outcomes, things that you get. And you're probably doing a lot of activities right now. The question is, are you getting the outcomes that you want and need? In almost every case, there's a disparity, a disagreement between the amount of activities you're doing and the amount of outcomes that you achieve. In another episode, I talked about the return on effort, which is almost arguably more important than return on investment. That we want to do as little, as few activities as we can and get as big of and as many outcomes as possible. The dilemma we have is we often approach this from the left to the right, from activities to outcomes. And that makes sense intuitively. We have to do stuff to get an outcome. The problem is you've been doing these activities for a while and not getting the outcomes that you want. That's the first problem. And so if you keep doing the same activities and hoping the outcomes will change, then you're mistaken. We need to rethink the process here. That's number one. The second is we have a misunderstanding about the level of activity required to achieve an outcome. On both sides, first, we assume that we need to do a lot of stuff to get an outcome. That is not true. We also want to believe that we could do a little bit and get a lot. And that can be true, but in 99% of the time, it's not true. And so we need to level set our expectations on what types and amount of activities are required to get the types and amounts of outcomes that we want. That's the second piece. The third piece, though, is that I think we have this completely backwards. The activities that you pursue, the activities that you're doing right now, are completely irrelevant until you understand the outcomes you're trying to achieve. If you're doing a bunch of activities and looking over and seeing what outcomes they achieved, then you're approaching this the wrong way. We need to start with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey tells us, and think about what are the outcomes we really want and need. And I'll be honest with you, it's probably a lot fewer outcomes than you think. That if you were to list out all the outcomes you could possibly want, many marketing directors would list out dozens of things. We want traffic to go up, we want leads, we want pipeline, we want brand awareness, we want these channels to go off, we want to grow the team, we want to work with these brands. There's a lot of outcomes you can want, but there's a very small set of outcomes that you need. And at any given moment, the outcomes that you need change dramatically. So right now you might need traffic. Maybe you don't have enough people coming to your door, to your website, and asking, inquiring about doing business with you. Maybe you have enough traffic right now and you need more people to actually reach out and request a conversation, a demo. Or perhaps you have enough traffic and you have enough people requesting conversations with you, but they're not closing and there's some issue there, some bottleneck. So the outcomes at any given moment change. They're dynamic, they're fluid, they're not static. And this means that the activities that you do, that you pursue, should also change. Both in terms of the amount of activities, which activities, and how much you invest in those activities. And so the first step is to figure out what outcomes do you really need. Right now, today, what is the smallest set of outcomes that would benefit you? Where is the bottleneck? Do you need more traffic? Do you need more engagement? Do you need more conversations? Do you need more pipeline? You probably need many of those things, but the first step is to figure out where is the real bottleneck? Where can you create leverage? If you have a decent amount of traffic, you probably don't need more traffic. You need to fix the conversion problem, the conversion bottleneck. Why is that traffic not converting? Why are they not doing the thing you want them to do? That's the bottleneck to solve. Perhaps if you have the wrong traffic, then yes, you need more and different traffic. And so step one here is to figure out what are the outcomes you really need. Not the outcomes that you want or that are possible, but what are the outcomes that you really need right now, today. In my coaching group, the advisory board, we operate on a six-week cycle. And what that means is that every six weeks, we evaluate what's the one or two projects, priorities right now that if we were to solve, would move the needle forward. And so every six weeks, we're looking at this and deciding right now what's the problem to solve. Today it might be traffic, but in six weeks, we might have more traffic and it might be a conversion issue, just as an example. So you should be looking at this on a continual basis to evaluate what the problem we need to solve now, where is the bottleneck, and what outcomes do we need to achieve to improve that, to move it forward. That's the first step. Once you understand that, then we can look at the activities and decide what are the right activities to do to achieve that outcome. And hopefully, what are the fewest or smallest amount of activity we can put into this to achieve that outcome? And often you don't have to achieve the entire outcome. We just need to validate and show that it's possible that we're doing the right things and that given enough time and budget and effort, the outcome will be achieved, or we can at least move the needle forward and make progress. This is where testing and running experiments is key. Because just because you think these activities will generate the outcome doesn't mean they will. And just because it works for your competition or worked in the past for someone doesn't mean it'll work today. I've talked about this before, but your industry is different, your customers are different, your product is different or your service is different, your team has different skills and experiences. And so nothing that works for anybody else will necessarily work for you. You have to figure out what works and how it'll work. And that means the activities that you do might look different. They might look different from what other people are doing, they might look different from what your competition is doing, they might look different from what you've been doing up to this point. And so you need to decide what are the activities that we'll invest in, that we'll choose to do, but keep in mind they might change. And we need to validate them first. This is why I'm a firm believer in testing. And I call this test-driven marketing, which is pick some activities and test them, validate that we can actually see the progress being made, we can see the engagement, the response, the beginnings of the outcome that we want, so we can make sure these are the right activities. Because in 90% of the cases, you will be wrong about the activities that you choose, and or how you execute them will not be the most effective. And that's okay. Marketing is not a science necessarily in its entirety. It's there's art to it as well. And so we need to test, we need to experiment, and we need to get some data and some validation from the market, from our prospects to determine what they really need from us and how can we give them what they need so we can get the outcome that we want. So the first step is to figure out the outcomes that you really want and need right now, and then to figure out which activities will you invest in for the next short period to test to see if they will lead to those outcomes and if there's any correlation between what activities you do now and the outcome you can achieve. And I'll give you a big spoiler alert here. Marketing is generally seen as a slow-moving machine that we do a bunch of stuff. And if you give us a year or two, you'll see the results of this on the other side. You'll see the brand has been built. You'll see that leads start to trickle in. This is nonsense. I think in six weeks or less, you can do an activity and determine if it will lead to the outcome you want. Will it get the outcome necessarily in that time period? Maybe not. But you'll be able to see that it could lead to that outcome. This is where you need to look for those validation metrics. And this is the testing process of doing something and understanding how to get a response quickly, how to validate it fast and cheap, and how to determine the next step. If we keep doing this, I can see ahead into the future of what would play out, what would happen. The more experienced you get at this, the more you embrace testing as not only a mentality but also a methodology, the better you can be about moving faster and dialing in and figuring out which activities are worth pursuing and how to optimize those activities to achieve the outcome that you want. Let me back up and rewind to the beginning of this episode, because I told you that most marketing directors get activities and outcomes confused and they get it backwards. What they do is that they choose an arbitrary set of activities and they commit to them long term, hoping that the outcomes that they want will be achieved, but they haven't clearly defined the outcomes that they want. In many cases, they've been given a list of predetermined outcomes to achieve, and the activities they're doing and the outcomes they hope to achieve are not aligned, and they have no process to evaluate how to change either one. I'm proposing to you you need a process to first determine right now what are the outcomes we need to achieve, and then second, a process to test and decide which activities can we validate quickly and efficiently that are effective in moving the needle and leading us towards our outcomes. The better you get at both sides of this equation, the more effective your marketing will be, and the easier marketing becomes. The key here is to remember your outcomes will change at any given moment. You need to focus on the right outcome. Solve the problem you need to solve today. Don't try to solve every problem. And second, you can cut most of what you're doing because many things you're investing in, time and effort and money, are irrelevant, are not going to have the impact that they need to have or could have because you're trying to solve the wrong problem. So start with the outcomes and then determine the activities you need to invest in today to move the needle forward on those outcomes. If you approach marketing in this way, it'll be easier, it'll be simpler, and it will be more powerful. So if the outcome is to achieve better marketing and do so faster and easier, then the activity for you right now is to take a step back and think about what are the outcome you need to solve today, what's the big problem right now, the bottleneck in your marketing, and what is the smallest set of activities you could experiment with, you could test a hypothesis perhaps to validate, to determine how you can move the needle and achieve that outcome in the next six weeks.