One question that I’m dedicated to answering before starting any project for the remainder of this year is “What does success look like?” I’ll start right here with this blog post – what does success look like for this particular post?
I’ll consider this, or any business blog post successful if it
- helps you in some way – if it causes you to consider something from a new angle, teaches you something, encourages you to make a change if needed, or to stay the course while you wait and work toward something big.
- engages you in some way – if you give me some feedback via a comment, link to it, or share it.
- sparks a conversation
- brings new readers to this site who sign up for our email newsletter so that we can stay in touch.
How will I know if I’ve met any of those measures of success? Some of it is straightforward – notifications of comments, links, shares, and email sign-ups. Some of it can be gleaned through Clicky Analytics (affiliate link) and keyword alerts. My favorite is when someone tells me personally, “I read your article and it really helped me!”
This approach removes the fluff. It changes the reason for the blog post from “I need to post something this week” to “how can I help my reader?” It becomes the starting point for a content strategy – which should be part of your overall marketing strategy – which is a big part of your business growth strategy.
Are You Compartmentalizing Your Marketing?
A business is made up of many moving parts. Depending on the business, those moving parts may include operations, management, marketing, finance, legal, production, PR, planning, shipping, etc. If you’re a very small business, one to three people might be sharing all of the hats, doing all of the work. Very often marketing suffers because it’s the easiest to skip when business is good, and the hardest to fund when there is no work.
But I want to challenge you to look beyond the marketing. Take a holistic look at your business and ask yourself, what does success look like? Is your business the picture of success right now? Congratulations!
Or are you barely getting by?
If you’re barely getting by today, take a thorough look at all the moving parts of your business. 
There may be far more than lack of marketing at play. Examine your business like a holistic doctor would examine your body, with the idea that all systems are interrelated. Interview your managers. Ask them:
- What would make this a better company?
- How can we better serve our customers?
- What would make it a better place to work?
Then get some feedback from your customers. Are they satisfied with your service? Your brand? Your product offering?
Now, with this broader, holistic view of your company in place, take that picture of what success looks like and ask yourself, what would it take to move the needle just 10% toward your vision of success?
- Can you see it? Great! Write it down.
- How long will that take? Stick a date on it.
- How will you know when you’ve improved that 10%? What’s the metric you can track? Make sure you track it!
Build Momentum
Do whatever it takes to build momentum to accomplish that 10% goal … then keep going. The hardest part is building momentum. After that, simple physics kicks in … an object in motion tends to stay in motion.
We’re growing here at Zero To Sixty Marketing so we added a part-time assistant to our team last month. We’ve established new systems and processes for better communication, and automated many of the grunt-work type tasks to get more done in less time. We’ll continue to fine tune our processes, and plan to hire another team member by the end of the month.
Our picture of success extends beyond serving our customers well. We also value creating opportunities, otherwise known as jobs, for skilled workers. We believe that a business has a responsibility to bring value to their customers and the community at-large.
Just as a person needs to do some soul searching from time-to-time to grow as an individual, a business needs to be scrutinized from within from time-to-time – always asking the questions “What does success look like? And what steps can we take to get from here to there?”
What does your picture of success look like? Drop a comment below.
