Don’t Forget About Secondary Goals

Don’t Forget About Secondary Goals

You’ve identified your Marketing goals – all of them – and given thoughtful weighting to each one, in order to establish a hierarchy or goals matrix.

What’s next? Do you:

-       Focus all of your resources on the primary goal, to the exclusion of all others?

-       Pro-rate your budget according to the precise weighting given to each goal?

-       Establish some cutoff point, and only devote resources to goals above that line?

Each of these approaches could seem reasonable. But simply selecting one over the others would be arbitrary, and that’s not worthy of our Six Sigma methodology.

We also must consider the relative cost of success in order to achieve efficiency.

If it will be difficult or impossible to move the needle on a relatively high ranked goal, but easy and inexpensive to dominate share of voice on a lesser goal, our process will earmark “just enough” capital on the latter in order to achieve greater overall success.

No one would suggest focusing a major campaign on insignificant goals. However, by periodically stepping back to review the “big picture,” you frequently will find opportunities for quick wins lurking among those secondary priorities.

Let’s look at a simplified analysis:

Goal one is ranked at 60 points on a 100-point scale. It’s pretty important.

Goal two is ranked at 25 points – fairly low-priority.

We estimate our current performance on goal one at 4 out of 5. We’re doing quite well.

On goal two, we’re only earning a 1 out of 5 – we are essentially irrelevant.

Through the best analysis available, we believe that if we devote a $500,000 campaign to goal one, we could improve our performance to a grade of about 4.25. If you multiply that incremental increase against the weighting, i.e. .25 times 60, our total Marketing performance would improve 15 points.

In contrast, we estimate that we could improve the performance grade on goal two from 1 to 3 quite easily by holding a single public relations event, at a cost of $50,000. That 2-point shift in performance multiplied by the weighting of 25 points gives us an overall Marketing boost of 50 points – a larger contribution to the overall Marketing goals matrix, at one-tenth the price.

This theoretical example readily shows how important the weighting process becomes as a decision-making tool.