It’s now the end of the second week in June. Close to the end of the second quarter of 2020. How are you doing? Are you regaining hope for the future?
You aren’t alone on the planet if you were to say that this quarter has not gone as you had envisioned it would at the start of the year. With Q2 starting just weeks after the pandemic was declared, you may have entered this quarter either without a plan – or kept to an unchanged plan you knew you had no chance of achieving.
Most marketers would have considered throwing their plans out the window and changing to a totally reactive stance, continuously shifting and changing. Some people stopped promoting at all. Some tone deaf people kept the same old ads. Some tried to say they understood and some failed. I don’t know about you but I thought the early pandemic ads with empty streets and voice overs that they care got old very quickly. And after the events of the past few weeks, I want to SEE that a company is committed to social change, not just receive a PR email from them.
So, the question I ask now is, what are you going to do to move forward in Q3? A version of a favorite expression of mine: here we are, now what?
It’s time to do things differently. Even in our marketing. It is time to dust off our plans and revisit our whys and hows. Time to reset our goals for the future.
Because that’s where hope grows.
I do feel we are at a sea change point in time. I love that expression too. It has it’s origins in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is about transformation. And that is what we need to move forward. We need to transform how we do things.
I am working on a post on OKRs for marketing that I will publish on my blog next week. OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, is a practice that grew out of the tech industry in Silicon Valley.
Objectives answer the question – where do you want to go? Key Results answer the question: how will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? It’s how we navigate our way to accomplishing our goals.
Organizations set 2 or 3 OKRs for each team. It’s not just something in tech, marketing teams can do this to. We can set OKRs for our big goals. You may already be using them in your work.
I’m revisiting my own OKRs. Setting some real objectives for Q3. Deciding how I will measure their progress, my key results. Updating my dashboard so they are visible.
How do you plan to reset now that we are entering Q3? What expectations are being placed on your team? Are you hopeful that you can achieve them? Please, hit reply and let me know.
Here’s to creating a brighter future in Q3!
