Marketing

5 Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Themselves

July 24, 2014

Marketers: your to-do list may be filled to the brim, but sometimes it’s best to stand back and take a look at your hard work. In this post, OpenView’s Morgan Burke shares the five most important marketing questions you should be asking yourself.

As you embark on new marketing opportunities, there’s a plethora of things to learn: a new company culture, a potential new industry, a new target market, new automation tools, and the ever-changing algorithms of Google and almost every social channel. It’s easy to let the daunting learning curve hold you back from taking charge of your role.
I’ve been lucky enough to work for an agile startup and now OpenView, where the opportunity to instill change is all around me. Hopefully, you have that opportunity where you are, too. But as we all know, believing in the power of change versus knowing how to address change are two very different things.
One common fault of a lot of marketers is that we tend to go through motions without asking important questions. I wrote a post a few months ago about Rand Fishkin’s presentation on how important it is for marketers to be great skeptics. But no matter how skeptical you are, you also need to be able to ask the right questions.

Stop Yes’ing and Start Understanding: 5 Important Marketing Questions to Assess Your “Why?”

Marketers, start asking yourselves: 

1) What are our goals?

Goals are such a basic requirement for any marketing team, but if your goals aren’t SMART or if you haven’t nailed down the key components of how and why you’re going to reach said goal, then you’re setting your team up for failure.
Here’s a breakdown of the goals you should be settings:

  • High level goals: Where does the business need to be by the end of the quarter?
  • Team level goals: What are the projects and results you want your team to achieve by end of quarter?
  • Individual goals: What are you responsible for and how do these results and activities directly impact both the team and high level goals?

If your individual goals do not directly correlate or roll up to the other goals, say something and adjust accordingly.

2) Why do we do it this way?

Seven times out of ten, you won’t get a very compelling answer. With that’s the case, you need to use your knowledge and understanding of what you do and the impediments you encounter to make some changes.
At startups and expansion-stage companies, the business didn’t grow because there was a big, beautiful perfect strategy in place. It grew because people worked their butts off. Now that the dust has settled, take the opportunity to ask yourself this question. You’ll often find that the only reason a process or checklist hasn’t changed is because there wasn’t the time or the resources to do it previously. You can change that.

3) Why are we measuring this?

So, what should you really be tracking?

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5 Key Sales and Marketing SaaS Metrics


It’s typical to get requests to see additional metrics, but be careful not to let reporting be a complete time-suck. Ask yourself and your team why you’re measuring what you are and keep track of the action items that are coming out of your retrospectives or dashboard meetings. If nobody is looking at certain metrics or if you aren’t actively using that data to inform your future strategy, then you can probably cut it from the report.
The same goes for how often you’re pulling data. Is it taking you two hours to report on numbers every single week that nobody is looking at? Reconsider how often you’re pulling data and be sure you’re spending enough time actually analyzing data.

4) What is the business purpose?

Marketers — particularly those in the social media and/or brand marketing space — have a very visible job in their company. They are likely the person posting updates to social pages, updating information on the company website, and communicating the release of new content. If this is your role then peers from various teams will often feel connected to what you’re doing and will have a lot of opinions. This is fantastic and offers a ton of opportunities to try something new, think of something in a different way, and — above all — improve your strategy.
That being said, it also opens you up to a lot of distractions.
If members of your team or company are coming to you with a ton of new ideas, you absolutely have to demand to understand the business purpose. If there isn’t one that’s convincing, you need to deprioritize. Chasing the next shiny object is not an effective marketing practice so you reserve the right (and the responsibility!) to take charge of your strategy.

5) What kind of impact will this have?

Once you feel comfortable that a new project or test serves a valid and critical business purpose, you need to prioritize it. Sure, we all want to try everything on social and email and content, but here in this place called reality, that’s not possible. In order to make these decisions, you need to know potential impact.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that it’s not always possible to gauge exactly how much impact a project will have. However, take some time to put a work plan together that includes resources needed, projected time spent, difficulty level of activities, and correlation to high-priority goals. From here, you’ll be in a better place to determine those projects that require less time for more results and those that are better off being prioritized next quarter or even next year.

What important marketing questions do you feel you should be asking? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

Free Assessment

Now that you’ve answered the “why” behind your actions, it’s time to evaluate your performance. 


Image by Ethan Lofton

Chief Marketing Office

<strong>Morgan Burke</strong> is Chief Marketing Officer at <a href="https://greenpinatatoys.com/">Green Pinata</a>. She previously worked on OpenView's marketing team.