If you’re a marketer and you need to set your goals, you’ve got to think of those two types:

• Your own personal goals
• The goals of your organisation

We did a bit of work a few years ago, trying to understand silos in businesses. One of the key things we found was that, even within marketing departments, there were silos; particularly in a big organisation. You’ve got an SEO team and you’d have a social team and you’d have a PR team and they didn’t talk to each other, they were in these little silos; they have their own KPIs and they wouldn’t know what each of those KPIs were. As a result, you almost had these competing interests.

So as a marketer, particularly marketing managers, you need to be the person who understands what all of the KPIs are, so that you can make sure that everyone is working together. You’ve got to be that Master Mixer. You’ve got to be the person who is setting the agenda for each of those different specialists to encourage collaborative working.

It’s important to know where the organisation is going. You need to know what the organisation’s goals are.

A Marketer is a key part of the goal setting process. As a Marketer, you need to be the person saying “these are what we should be selling,” “these are our current customers/ the people we should be selling to”

Marketers are the closest people to customers and know, better than anyone else, who their customers are.  Therefore, Marketers should be suggesting, “we need to invent this product because this is what we’ve been asked for,” as opposed to the organisation asking, “we’ve invented this product, who can we sell it to?”

Consequently, once the organisation realises the level of customer intelligence in a Marketers’ head, Marketers become increasingly valuable assets to guide future product development.

Once the goals of your organisation have been set, it’s important to think about your own personal goals as a Marketer.

Where do you want to be:

• In a few months time?
• In several years time?

As a Marketer, it’s essential to be in a continuous learning and development process.

Think about how many new things turn up in digital marketing every week, how do you keep afloat? You have to set some time aside to research things, either ad-hoc, or scheduled for a specific day each week. Look for new digital trends and highlight opportunities, new ideas, new channels, and just make sure you’re conscious of them.

One of the things I get a lot of marketers to do is if whenever they’re working is just to have a Twitter stream of people, they follow who they would regard as influential other marketers, influential strategists and so on, because you can keep an eye on that. If something new pops through, Twitter allows you to grab that to have a look at later.

That’s a great way of keeping an eye on your own personal development and also identifying things, which might have a future value, for the organisation. That’s when you start to mix up your own personal development with the organisations development and, that sits naturally with any businesses’ professional development process.

Rather than being reactive to change, you should proactively develop ideas. When you come to a PDR (Performance and Development Review), you should be in a position to say “well absolutely none of that is relevant anymore, because things have happened since then.”

If you’re setting time aside to your personal development on a weekly basis, you will think a lot faster in those those situations and you can respond much quicker; making you look particularly pragmatic.