How to Sustain Positive Changes In Your Marketing Team - CoSchedule

How to Sustain Positive Changes In Your Marketing Team Leading a marketing team to win feels amazing. Smashing goals is gratifying. But sustaining change in organizations thats the hard part. We marketers face a tall order. Not only do we have to make hyper growth happen, we have to do it every day. Every time we reach the summit of one goal, a taller one is just around the bend. Your boss: Did your team get 100 new leads last week? You: Yes! ðŸ˜Æ' Your boss: Nice work! But are you on track for 125 this week? You: Well, that escalated quickly 😠³ In short, our job is to start from zero and soar past last week. So, in this post Im going to share with you how to to sustain those positive changes (and results) in your marketing team. Youll learn: The key to putting your teams success on cruise control. How to develop a built-in mechanism for sustained results. Exactly why (and how) to keep your team hungry to win. PLUS, because youre awesome, Ive got something extra special for you If you wanna learn why over 8,000 marketing teams across the world choose to organize and execute their entire marketing strategy in one place Schedule a 30 minute marketing demo of right now. Youll see exactly how teams like Convince Convert, Smart Passive Income, and Campaign Monitor get amazing results with . Now, pick a time for your 1-on-1 marketing demo and lets get to it. How To Sustain Positive Changes In Your Marketing Team by @jordan_loftis via @Develop Smart Marketing Habits As A Team Riffing on Aristotle, former Patriots offensive linemen, Matt Light, said in his retirement remarks: â€Å"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.† We hear it here five thousand times a week. Just worry about yourself, not others, make it part of your routine. Keep striving to do it better and better. The excellence we all shared as an organization, teammates, friends, everyone else. It’s not just as an act, it’s a habit, it’s how we live our lives, what we try to do day-in and day-out. These words are wonderfully portable for anyone who cares about sustaining change in organizations. Whether youre a manager or team member, your teams success is your success. And thats where positive, team-based habits come in. How Habits Work (And Why It Matters) According to a study in the British Journal of General Practice, the wild world of healthcare shows us this, as well. Furthermore, even when patients successfully initiate the recommended changes, the gains are often transient because few of the traditional behaviour change strategies have built-in mechanisms for maintenance. Unless positive changes become engrained habits, achieving goals will become the exception rather than the rule. Unless positive changes become engrained habits, achieving goals will become the exception ratherThat same psychological study defines habits this way: actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance. For a marketer, this habit loop might look like this #1. Your Contextual Cue Your team is planning a new campaign. And you need to get everything organized 📠Ã‚  creative brief, 📄  landing pages, âÅ"‰ï ¸ Ã‚  email copy, âÅ" Ã¯ ¸ Ã‚  blog posts, 🙋†Ã¢â„¢â‚¬Ã¯ ¸  social media messages, 🎉  press releases, ðŸÅ' Ã‚  design assets, 🎠¯Ã‚  target metrics, 📈  analytics reports, 😠«Ã‚  and more Thats a lot of stuff. (And Im probably missing plenty of other things you do.) #2. Your Engrained Action So, be honest. Whats your go-to action given the contextual cue of planning a new marketing campaign? For tons of marketers, its pulling out ye olde spreadsheet! Everything gets a tab. Everyone gets access on your internal drive or Dropbox account. And in short order, chaos ensues. ^^^These are actual screenshots of spreadsheets, calendars, and systems customers have transitioned from over the years! Here at , we call this a symptom of makeshift marketing. Simply defined, makeshift marketing happens when disconnected tools and apps are mashed into one martech stack. In our experience, this is one of the most difficult traps (and series of habits) to break for marketers. But theres good news ahead! This step is complete when your automatic action (read habit) is completed. Then, one more thing happens. #3. Your Reward In his best-selling book,  The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg outlines a third piece to the habit puzzle: reward. The reward reinforces the habit loop. With every completion, the habit gets more powerful. In this case, the spreadsheet gives a sense of control, organization, and peace of mind. The problem is that it quickly becomes messy. Often, youll end up with spreadsheets to manage your spreadsheets! Your Habits Become Your Teams Habits The linchpin to sustaining changes in your organization, then, is leading the right habits so you get the right results consistently. Just imagine if your team smashed your marketing goals with the same frequency as brushing your teeth? ^^^ Thats habit 101. Lets talk about how to move from marketing mess To marketing mastery. According to research at UCL Epidemiology and Public Health, it takes an average of 21 – 66 days to lock a habit in place. To help your team, I suggest this 3-step approach. Begin with your teams goal and reverse engineer actions to achieve it. Establish a rhythm of accountability. Build out *at least* a 21-day habit roadmap for your team. #1. Begin With Your Teams Goal First things first, pull a Stephen Covey Begin with the end in mind. Start with your teams goal (or goals). Then reverse engineer the consistent actions your team must habitually take to get there. For example, lets imagine your team needs to grow social media engagement by 25% month-over-month across all channels. If I pull our Social Engagement Report in , I can get a quick overview of where we stand. Both for an aggregate average  and individual networks. From this baseline, you can reverse engineer your ideas, tests, and tactics to grow your engagement. But just as important, you can learn what your team must be doing  every week to keep engagement going up and to the right. Intense sprints will give your key metrics a lift in the near term. But its turning your highest-value actions into habits that help you win in the long term. For instance, if you learn that social images get a higher engagement on your social channels, the new habit should be that everything your team does has 3 – 5 promo images. (You can use visual storytelling frameworks like microcontent to do this with great results, by the way.) Or perhaps video does really well with your tribe. The new behavior to automate might become a Facebook live video promoting every new post you publish. Heres the anatomy: Contextual cue: Your team publishes new content. Action: The creator of the piece streams a Facebook live video sharing a short TL;DR version and a CTA. Reward: More social media engagement + referral traffic. Next Step For Sustaining Change In Your Organization: You might be wondering, How is this different than simply adding an item to your teams workflow? Its distinct because of its emphasis on engraining a behavior versus checking a box. For you, as the team leader, leveraging the power of habits  means automating behaviors. When you put the  right  things on autopilot, they move themselves ahead with little (or no) friction. #2. Build Accountability Into Your Teams Weekly Rhythm To do this means using the A word accountability. Accountability gets a bad rap. And thats because inherent is the threat of punishment. If youre accountable for your actions, youre responsible for their outcomes. If youre accountable for your actions, youre responsible for their outcomes.A multi-year study involving over 40,000 participants found: Accountability is incorrectly perceived as strictly consequential and almost entirely after-the-fact- 80% of those surveyed say feedback is something that happens to them only when things go wrong or not at all. Ouch. But what if accountability could be more positive than negative? It can. And it starts with ditching the word while leveraging the essence. Accountability is about: clarity, alignment of actions with goals, and enablement of the right behaviors. Sustaining Change In Your Organization With Clarity Another alarming stat from the accountability study is: 85% of survey participants indicated they werent even sure what their organizations are trying to achieve The quickest path to a homerun here is simple: be ultra clear with what results your team is after. Is there one overarching goal youre hell bent on achieving? Then talk about that. Every. Dang. Day. Is there a long-term goal supported by smaller, short-term goals? ^^^ This is the case for nearly every team Ive ever worked on. If this is true, then keep your short-term goals in perspective. Help your team see how they accomplish your overall mission. One of the best ways to do this is through twice-per-week numbers check in. Automating Clarity With Strategic Reporting If we stick with our social engagement example, heres what it could look like. With , you can automate key reports. So lets automate the social engagement report. (If you dont use , totally okay. You can still do this.) Navigate to your analytics tab, then choose  Social Engagement Report. Next, simply click on  the  Schedule Report button. Then add any team members or stakeholders who should see this report. Your progress will be automatically reported to everyone involved without you having to pull numbers yourself 🠤“ The key here is to keep your team focused on the goal even amidst the deluge of modern marketing. Keep your team focused on the goal even amidst the deluge of modern marketing.Sustaining Change In Your Organization With Alignment Of Actions And Goals Now comes the supercharging power of habits. By consistently performing the right actions, your team will move the needle in the right direction. As you keep the mission in front of your team, help them understand the best actions to take them there. One of the best places to do this is in your team meetings. And you can begin by having everyone answer this simple question: If you could only do one thing every day to achieve [team goal], what would it be? Have everyone answer the question. Then, ask them to explain why that action is so powerful. If you could only do one thing every day to achieve your goal, what would it be?Sustaining Change In Your Organization By Enabling The Right Behaviors And now, enable those positive behaviors with a third question: What roadblocks are there between you and consistently [taking desired action]? This is where you come in. As a team leader, you should be an obstacle bulldozer. Its tough enough to form new, positive habits. (And break negative ones while youre at it.) So clear the debris and get the crap out of the way. Clear the clutter between your team and their most critical actions. Then keep doing this. If your team is supposed to increase social engagement, and creating short promo videos to promote a piece is their desired activity, youd better make sure they arent stacked with a bunch of stuff that makes it impossible to get it done. Once your team is assigned a goal, make sure they arent stacked with a bunch of stuff that makes#3. Build Your 21-Day Habits Roadmap For Your Team To bring this all together, the best way forward is for you to get clear on what the next 21 working days should look like. Scientifically, it takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days to establish a new habit, with the average being 66 days. So, you can go for the hail mary and push your team for 66 days Or 100 Or 254 if youd like. However, I suggest a quicker win: build a 21-day habits roadmap for your team. In one of my favorite startup books,  Lean Analytics,  authors Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz  explain the rationale for setting goal metrics, saying: [I]f you want to change behavior, your metric must be tied to the behavioral change you want. So focus the roadmap on the singular, most important behavior youd like to download into each team member. This can be super simple. They key here is to show your team that youre committed to helping them build this habit just as much as they should be. Create a Projects Checklist. Assign it to the right team member and set its completion date 21 days from now. Then, assign the appropriate actions. A clever way to start is by having each team member outline their own habit loop. How will they engrain this new high-value activity? They should define a cue, routine, and reward. Then, they should run through the habit loop  every day for the next 21 working days. This might look like: A 21-day video promotion campaign, Logging into, and using, a new software tool every day (HUGE win for onboarding your team to new tools), Or even writing a fresh social post every single day. Whatever it is, make sure you empower your team to make time each day.