You can’t fix what you can’t measure.

True. But as with all truths, look at it bass-ackwards for more truth.

Measuring, especially the wrong things, doesn’t mean you can fix anything.

But it sure feels good.

Tracking and gathering data fuels a feeling of possibility. It keeps business owners enraptured by enticing them to feel busy and salient, purpose-driven and informed.

The hidden promise is to waste your time if you focus on it first.

To track, plan, and set goals allows us to try and own what comes next. It is the ultimate in adulting for a business owner to look at and plug in data. You can use it to decode how every little thing in your business is working. It is a foundation to upgrade, change, and expand procedures, policies, and possibilities.

Ah, foul temptress.

Before the data and the tracking is a simple question.

How will you measure success?

If you know the answer to that doozy, I promise you solid sleep and much success in a world with so many wins waiting for you.

Personal success, job success, and product success.

I am talking Marketing Success.

Your marketing professional, the person you trust, should have asked you that question a long time ago. And many times more since you both became a team dedicated to the growth of your company.

Not, “So, what do you think?” or, “Do you like this plan?” Both are often followed by a quiet stare that makes you uncomfortable.

I wasn’t a fan of Miss Stratachuk. When I took home my second term report card, I was beyond proud to read her precise, perfect script commending my reading accomplishments. I had read more than any other student in grade 2.

Our classroom walls had a fantastic paper road stretching to all four corners. Coloring-book-style cut-out boys and little girls walked the path. Each student had colored their proxy and written their name on either the dress or button-down collared shirt. The path was dotted with signpost numbers, indicating Books Read and I promise you, no one was even close to my little brown-haired, book-clutching, skipping-along pixie.

Eventually, Miss Stratachuk looked in my journal where I tracked my reading. She noticed that the last 50 or so books were in fact chapter names from the junior novels I was reading.

Technically, I had not read more books than anyone.

I patiently explain to her, that each of my tracked chapters was beyond the equivalent of any Dick and Jane, Dr. Seuss, or Little Golden Something book that the other kids were struggling through.

I also detailed how unfair she was for counting small books and real books as equivalent. Of course, I had shared this knowledge with some of my equally persecuted friends. I was in full-on negotiation mode. I had read more than anyone. Just, perhaps, unfairly, not more individual books.

She told me we weren’t doing that. We were measuring books, not pages read.

She moved my Little Leah cutout backward.

And I stopped reading.

Well, I didn’t actually stop reading, but I stopped tracking. Little Leah never moved for the rest of the term.

I rolled my eyes at her during reading time. I left class every day with a 7-year-old huff of indignation.

She and I were measuring different things.

I went from feeling like a complete success, based on measuring reading habits, to feeling defiant and completely unconnected to her measurement of the number of books read.

Why waste time reading a stack of beginner books to simply play the game, and be measured as a success? A chapter book was interesting, challenging, and improved my reading skills, yet it was one little move on the path to success as she was measuring it.

She was The Teacher and was measuring success in a specific way. I, her student, was measuring success in a different way. And ultimately, I did not want to play in her sandbox. And didn’t.

As a business owner, you can track all the data available to you, but if it is not helping your business grow, it is wasting your time.

How will you measure the success of your marketing plan?

And please, dig deeper than the cash register ringing, or new people walking in.

I stressed to one client that in about three months he was going to want to quit his branding campaign. He absolutely acknowledged that I could hit them over the back side of the head if he started having expectations of sales. We were branding and he wanted name awareness so that prospects knew who the heck he was. But still, in three months, he canceled because he wasn’t getting enough sales. His accountant saw branding as an expensive experiment. The client revealed his true measurement of success was in fact short-term sales activation, not long-term branding. The ads created for him were fantastic, and he would have owned his local market. Long term. For always. But he stopped, and the ads, his money, and my time were all wasted.

Another client told us what his measurement of success was. He had sold insurance for years and was established, but not growing. We had an Uncovery and strategy mining session. It was mining, because you’ve got a dig deep to find something interesting about a broker dealing in the commodity of insurance. Sure, his clients loved him, but how would he measure the success of a branding campaign?

His measurement of success was going to be people – any people- telling him they had heard his ads. And no, he did not want to voice any part of it. But if his business was suddenly going to be on the radio, he wanted to know people were hearing it. And as we spent the time getting to know him and his business, he also shared stories and smiles and chuckles about just how much he loved being a Grandpa.

So, we had a couple of his grandkids record part of his radio commercial. Their picture was also used on some very effective billboards.

And people, mostly people who knew him and his grandkids, but lots of people, told him they heard his ads. He counted his campaign a success, based on his very own measurement.

Marketing is like the journey people take toward better health.

Their main objective is to lose weight but that is not what they are going to tell you. They are going to tell you they want to be healthier. That’s the mature thing to say… but yeah, really, they want to drop some weight. That’s the big one.

But be more specific. To measure the success of any change in your physical life, look at the positive micro changes. Are you going to sleep better? Are you going to feel better? When you drop your keys is it gonna hurt as much to bend your knees? Out of all those little things, pick one. Decide how long will you give it, and know it will probably take longer.

And it will be worth it. Because you will know your health and wellness plan is working. And yes, you will also start to lose some weight.

A marketing plan is a means to grow a business. Some years, that means maintaining market share. If no one advertised, word of mouth would be enough. But word of mouth alone will not sustain any business in a competitive environment, no matter how incredibly well it is run.

Marketing is an investment. No one should get your marketing budget because you like them, you’ve known them for years, or you heard about this bright shiny new idea worth trying.

Decide how you will measure. And be prepared for your marketing team to tell you your measurement cannot be delivered exactly as you wish, or as quickly as you want. And let them help you dig deeper for the markers of success that will show you your plan is working… new smiles, more referrals, specific products being requested, resumes on your desk, or even people singing your song.

Decide how your team can properly measure chapter books too, and keep moving down the path toward success.

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