Goal Setting for Creatives: Frameworks That Build Momentum

1. Seven New Tools to Build Momentum: Ever felt like you're spinning your wheels, setting goals, that fizzle out, tracking metrics that don't actually tell you anything, or wait a second. What are metrics anyway? Well, this class is for you because today we're doing momentum planning for the next 30 days, not maybe some day planning. I want us to build a simple strategy that works for you. And for your life, messy and real as it is. My name is Fab and I'm the founder, head teacher at Alt Marketing School and I've helped thousands of marketers making marketing better for themselves and their audiences. One of the things that we have as marketers is lots of frameworks and acronyms and tools to plan better, to set big goals and achieve them by tracking results. These are the tools that I want to give you. The next hour or so. Here's what we're going to be covering together. We're going to look at goal setting that actually sticks by ditching any vague resolutions and actually building goals using some powerful frameworks that force clarity and action for yourself. Also, we are going to understand the difference between something called KPIs and metrics. Basically, understanding how you can stop drowning in data and start focusing on what matters and why you really should start doing that. Also looking at SWOT. SWOT as a strategy that delivers. There's something that is called SWOT analysis. If you never heard what it is, it's basically a very simple way to understand your strengths and weaknesses and opportunities out. Now you can use them. Finally, just to bring a bit of realness into this class, we're actually going to look at your real wheel of life. How do you want to feel in your personal and professional life as you are building your goals for the next 30 days? Not only, you're going to be able to access some bonus worksheets and support reflection step by step. At the end, you're also going to walk away with one simple page that brings it all together, goals, strategy, metrics, and even your actions for today, this week, and this month. No 12 step plan that you never look at, just a few simple templates and worksheets that can help you build momentum for the next 30 days and beyond. Ready to get started, May today's class, begin. 2. Fill Your Wheel Life: Very spicy take. I hate the phrase work life balance. Life isn't a perfect pie chart. It's seasons and each season has different amounts. You're not sacrificing, you're prioritizing. A few months ago, someone said that to me and it completely rewired my brain. I was joining in Gale trying to do it all with a new baby, new business season, same ambitious goals. In, how many areas of your life do you think you need to focus on to feel balanced? Is it ten, is it 20? Keep that number in mind, and the answer might surprise you? Because today I want to show you how we can use the Wheel of Life exercise but make it practical for real life. The Wheel of Life is a simple exercise where you rate different areas of your life 1-10, then decide what better looks like. Remember that question, how many areas do you need to focus on? The answer is, you can get lots of clarity we just four. But here's my twist. Instead of using lots of categories like career and health, you use your own values and you only pick four. Why four? Because we don't have time to spin 12 different plates. We need to focus. We don't need to overwhelm. So how do we make this practical and how do we make this work for us? If you like paper, you can just grab a piece of paper and split it into two. First of all, we're going to define your values. So we're going to write personal values on one side, like relationships, joy, movement, risk creativity. And on the other side, we're going to write professional values, things like focus, autonomy, impact, revenue, creativity. Now you circle your top four across board lists. And make sure that the become your current life speak for. These will become your will slices for now. Then for each slice, I want you to jot down two things. The current score 1-10 and then what a plus one will look like, no plus five, no a plus six, just one point better. Then just ask three simple clarity questions for each slice. What am I willing to do to make this better? What am I willing to stop doing? That's blocking me? And how can I make this feel sustainable? Not stressful. These questions are great because they might force you to get honest without getting really harsh. This is an example of a reason one of mine so that you can see what messing real really looks like. As it stands right now, I go two days a week to do five days of work with eight months old baby, and my values are focus, family, creativity, and revenue. My plus one move is to schedule 290 minute d focus workblogs per working day. Is to turn any winning meal time into focus and group activity. Is to make sure that I actually create some time for creativity by batching or writing on one day in one morning, and also want to do one sale activity per week, like a follow up or a new offer. What I'm stopping is context switching, guilty yeses and trying to get perfection. As you notice, I'm not necessarily aiming to get everything done. I just want to get a plus one into the different places so that I can feel like I got a bit more control. So a smaller action that can help me feeling like I'm getting one step better. Here's your homework. Do this in the next week or so. Actually block 30 minutes on your calendar right now. Then list your top four values and turn them into four wheel slices. Score each slice with a one to ten, be honest, not harsh, and then write one plus one action for each slice that fits your real life. Then make a cut list. Maybe look at some things that you can delegate or can remove that are blocking that plus one. If you want a bonus, you can even celebrate one tiny win when you complete your first plus one. First and foremost, I want you to identify your core slices. What do they look like? If you get stuck, really good ones to start with are things like focus, relationship, creativity, and revenue. Remember, when you're choosing how to show up, you're not sacrificing, you're prioritizing. Some weeks is 60% work and 40% family and friends. That doesn't make you a bad parent, partner or professional. It makes you human. Use your season reality, not an ideal week and pick actions that will still work on a messy day. Focus on one will and then review it and refresh. Potentially new values out of your list. Make the time to do this and see what comes up for you. Until next time, never stop learning because practice makes progress. For now, class is dismissed. 3. Three Frameworks for your Goals: Taking a business course through our goals workshop, you know smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound, goal standards, the framework that everybody learns first, and honestly, it can work for a lot of people. However, I've noticed something working with hundreds and thousands of marketers. Smart goals are fantastic for certain types of objectives and humans, but not for everything. Want to increase email opens by 50%, smart goal, sorted, job done. The thing is marketing isn't just about incremental improvements. Sometimes we need some frameworks that can handle the messy, the creative, maybe the wildly ambitious stuff or the big hairy goals. The ones that feel so scary they don't really fit in a tidy little acronym. Or we need systems that actually help us follow through with motivation tanks. Today, we're exploring three frameworks that work differently from smart goals. One of these frameworks comes all the way from the White House. Do you know what goal setting framework was developed at Intel and then made famous by the team at Google? It's OKRs, objectives and key results. If you've been in marketing for more than 5 minutes, you probably heard of them. They force you to focus on outcomes instead of busy work. The objective is that qualitative goal, the what, the mountain you want to climb. The key results are the how, the two to three measurable metrics, they prove you're making progress. The reason why marketers and teams love OKRs is that they shift your focus from tracking activity to measuring impact. Instead of posting 30 times on LinkedIn, the OKR might be dominating brand conversation in my niche measured by achieving 1 million organic impressions and generating 500 qualified leads this quarter. Difference is that one is a task. The other one is an outcome that can move the needle and can be shifted depending on everything else that happens. The sweet part is to start with one or two ambitious objectives per quarter with two to three clear key results. This prevents you from getting too excited, trying to achieve everything, and actually get nothing done. A weak objective, one that I've seen in the world far too many times working with teams is improve customer acquisition. Cool, but how? I OCR power version might be something like, but our quarter, we will become the go to solution for midmarket tech teams because this segment represents the best conversion potential for our brand. Well, nobody succeeded when we generate 150,000 pounds in the new pipeline from Mid Market Leads, get ten K study from Tanker customers and achieve 5% conversation rate from demo to close deals. An OKR can set a great destination for the next 90 days, but a destination is useless without engine that gets you there. That's where there's another framework that can help. This is time for a che code, which I love. This one comes straight from Behavioral Science, and it feels like cheating because it works really well. We have ambitious OKR sets, but now there's a problem nobody talks about. Bike Week three out of 90 days, the goal you are so excited about feels like a burden. You might be procrastinated, distracted, or maybe your slack is just going insane. This is where a framework like Woop can actually help. WOOP stands for Wish outcome Obstacle and Plan. It is a deceptively simple four step method based on psychology research. It's all about pre planning for the resistance that we know will face. You wish is a meaningful challenging goal. Often this one is one of the key results that you have from your existing OKR. From this, you visualize the best outcome. What would you feel like to achieve it? What is the emotional or business payoff? Then this is the crucial part, you identify the main obstacle that stand in your way. Be brutally honest, is internal like procrastination or external lack of resources. Finally, you create a very simple if the plan. If obstacle happens, then I will take one specific action. If your key result from your OKR is publish 12 high quality block posts this quarter, then is a very simple whoop that can help you stay on track. I wish to consistently publish one great block post each week. I'll establish our brand as a thought leader and see a steady stream of organic leads. But I know as an obstacle that I'll be likely to procrastinas on the writing because I find the first draft intimidating. The plan is that if I sit down to write and I feel stuck, at a time I 25 minutes to just write terrible first draft without editing. The idea is that we want a concrete action for the exact moment when you hit the wall. We have a compass which is our OKRs, we will have an engine which is now we're going to go through and basically protecting the little time that we have to actually do it all. Because in the marketing world, there's so many things that are screaming for your attention right now. Let me ask you, which US president created a productivity framework that's now used by marketers worldwide? If you guessed, Asanoa, I suspect you might be pretty good at trial pursuit. Anyway, before he was president, he was a five star general who had to make life death decisions whilst managing thousands of competing priorities. What he did, he had a very simple four quadrant grid that sorted every task by urgency and importance. How it works. We have to do, which is urgent and important, the genuine crisis deadlines, schedule, which might be important but not urgent. A strategic work that actually might grow your strategy. Delegate sits between anything that is urgent but not important. So the noise that we actually need to shut down for a while, and delete is neither. It's the time wasted that we cannot say no to. And for marketers, our days are constantly hijacked by urgent but not important noise, slack pins, last minute requests, and the magic quadrant is very much important but not urgent. That's where you strategic planning, deep contact creation, and maybe even mark a research lift. These are the tasks that directly serve your OKRs, but never scream as loudly as that client email. Here's how we can use it. You can actually do a brain dump of everything on your plate. Then rootlessly sort each item. I recommend doing this weekly. You might realize that a last minute request for a social media graphic for a very prime pop culture means the best candidate for something like delegate or even delete. This filter can actually force you to ask the critical question. Does this task actually move me closer to my quarterly goals or is it just noise? Here's the full picture of these three frameworks and how they can work together. OKRs set your ambitious quoting destination. While Woop gives you a plan for each exact moment that motivation dies. Then the Eisenhower matrix protects your daily focus from all the noise trying to steal your attention. If you want to implement one thing from this lesson, start with the Heisen err matrix. Why? Because there's always something that you can do today to make your day today better. Start today because as I always say, practice makes progress. Go and download your own copy of the matrix for an ocean template, fill it and see what happens. Classes dismissed. 4. Measure Progress with KPIs: Manager just asked for the KPIs for your next campaign. Your stomach drops, you open a blank spreadsheet and your mind goes completely blank. You do what anyone would do. You google marketing KPIs and you get hit with a list of 100 things, impressions, clicks, likes, shares, boundaries. But how many of these are actually KPIs? The answer is probably none of them, and that is a problem. When you're sewing up this list, you're looking at metrics, not KPIs. There is a small yet huge difference between the two of them. A lot of people think they're the same thing, or they just interchange them and I think that confusion can lead to chaotic reports. They actually don't tell you if you're winning or losing. They both have an incredible place in any strategy in any campaign. The real question that we need to ask when we're looking at a number is, is this the score or is this the explanation? All right, let's break this down with an analogy. Think about football match. At the end of the game, what's the one number that tells you who won? That's the score. 21, that's CO KPI. But what are all the other numbers? Possession percentage, shots on target, passes completed. Those are metrics. They explain why the score is 21 and how you got there. If you lost, you look at those numbers to figure out what went wrong. But you're not really managing the possession start. What you manage is the game to win. This number is just a tool that tells you some of the things that happened. This is the same in marketing. Your KPIs are your scores, the two to three numbers that measure your core strategic goals. Most marketing plans need a score as much as they need the explanation of how it worked and what we're going to look at to make sure that we're on the right track. Your goal is to use Instagram to grow your email list by 1,000 qualified subscribers this quarter, and you want to spend less than five pounds per subscriber. What are your KPIs? Well, they're right there in the goal itself. Number one is new email subscribers from Instagram and number two is the cost per new subscriber. Those are the scores, they tell us if we want the game or. Halfway through the quarter, we only got 200 subscribers and the cost is 15 pounds each. That's a bad score. You know which metrics you're going to look into figure out why. Within your analytics, you know that you got 50,000 each on your reels, but only 500 proof of visits. Of those 500, only 50 clicked to the Link in your bio.O of those 50, only ten actually signed up on your landing page. The story is that the metric explaining why your KPI is underperforming. You know that your profile visit to reach ratio is weak and your Landing page conversion is turbll. This is where you focus your effort, and this is where we need not a KPI call out. Ready? Your kick through rate is not a KPI. You impressions are not a KPI. Your website traffic is not a KPI. They're all explanations until they are tied to growth and a specific goal. In fact, even things like followers matter if they directly drive to your score, like if you run a follower only promotion that actually leads to sales. Manages explanations instead of understanding that you need to have metrics to explain how close you are to hitting your goal is very important because you understand that there's going to be a combination of two things. As you are going through your weekly check in or binding a monthly report, you are going to have KPIs. But instead of having a promise plan sheet with 47 tabs, you can actually have a very simple one page scoreboard. This is our Wood Builder. I would have two to three KPIs, your scores. In our example, we had new subscribers and cost per subscriber. Then right below we'll have the key metrics that explain those scores. Like new subscribers, we can have Instagram reach, profile visit, link CTR, landing page conversion rate. The idea is that less is better, you're no longer walking into a meeting with a list of 20 numbers, trying to prove why you've been busy. You want to present a simple idea. There's a score, S Y is that way, and that's what we're doing about it. This is a way to change our conversation from look at all of these things are happening to here are our results and here's the plan that we can take. Before you next report or check in, look at your KPI, look at the bigger performance indicator that tells you whether you are on the right track. If you're not sure what is a KPI, ask yourself the question. This number that I'm tracking, this data that I'm looking at. Is it the score or is it the explanation? Hopefully, this has help you clarify the role of KPIs and metrics in your marketing mix. It's still data, but it's data with different purposes. Grab the score botemplate if you want to help you out, understanding the difference between the two of them and how they work together. Walk into the next meeting and actually talk about results instead of just desperately having to defend why you chose profile views over likes. Good luck and let me know how it goes. 5. Audit your Strengths with a SWOT: Your hand if you sat through a SWOT analysis that lasted 3 hours and end up with four Bt lists that nobody looked at again. If it sounds familiar, means you might have tried SWOT before and you know the pain, hours of workshops, potential random documents, the sit in drawers or virtual folders forever. I generally believe that's because most marketers are doing SWOT completely wrong. Wasting time on a tool that should be fast and powerful. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to transform SWOT from our slow and baked process into a great action oriented strategic tool that delivers client ready, team ready, strategy ready plans that actually will drive results. First quick context for anybody new, if you like Fab, why you're throwing out the acronym at me is not me. It's just the marketing world. But stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It's basically a way to map out what you're good at, what's holding you back, what's possible in the market, and what could hurt you. Simple framework and massive potential, but only if you do it right, I think that SWOT being treated as four separate lists instead of a system is the demise of the actual system itself. We brainstorm strength, weaknesses, but we never force ourselves to connect the bloody dots. A strength is useless if you don't know how to leverage it against an opportunity and a weakness doesn't matter if it's not actually exposing you to a threat. So this is where I introduced the so what test, my absolute favorite reality check for almost anything we teach at the school. For every single item in your list in any quadrant, you have to ask, so what? Why does it matter? What action does it demand? Here's how it works. You write down strength, great social presence, so what? Well, we can launch new products faster than competitors who rely on Bait ads. That's actionable. But if you write something like great office acoustics for recording videos, can we connect it to any result? Probably not. So we can easily delete it. A bad weakness is sometimes we lack focus because it's too vague and you can't really a whereas a good weakness is something like our customer response time is really long and it averages 48 hours because it's measurable and fixable. When in doubt, just write out and then make it more specific. The second step is actually to do an external environmental scan. You can take another 10 minutes to just look at opportunities and threats. Even better if you have the time to get real market data. If you need any research tools for our external scan, I recommend Google Trends because it's free and it shows what people are actually searching in your industry, which can be really interesting. TikTok and Instagram os are also free. This is where cultural trends surface before they hit search engines and even things like SAMR, it's paid, but it's powerful for competitive intelligence. Now this is where most people stop and go the four quadrants, and then they think they're done. And maybe they will add it in the strategy plan, and that's it. But I want to start finding connections between these quadrants. I want to start the intersections. This is where I want to make sure that I take the time to understand the connections that I can take actions because the magic doesn't happen in the quadrants themselves. It happens in the intersection. A lot of power into looking at strengthen opportunity connections. Strengthened via video content plus opportunity in a new platform means that you can dominate that platform. Similarly, if we have weakness and threat connections, these are your urgent fixes, like a slow customer service plus competitors launching 247 support means you need to fix response time immediately. Another interesting one is strengthened trend connections. This is your competitive mode, strong brand loyalty plus new cheaper competitors, means launching loyalty programs to make customers immune to price wars. All we need to do is look at these intersections and then generate some action. In order to do that, I like to prioritize. This is where we start scoring things, which is one of my favorite things to do as we all know, impact, confidence, and ease when it comes to actions to take for each of these steps. When it comes to impact on a final one to ten, how much impact will this have? How confident are you that it will work and how easy is it to implement? The highest combs course become your immediate priorities. So you're not picking ideas that sound sexy and you actually focus on what will deliver results and now how you can apply them into your strategy. What becomes powerful when you focus on strategic connections and not just long lists. Remember that three hour session that ended up with four vague lists, you can now do much better in 20 minutes with one page with actually action steps that you can take that are tied to different connections. You need some help, we do have a template to get you started. You can actually use in your strategy session or as you're building your marketing plan to give you the strengthen the understanding of how to set better goals and review your efforts. Give it a go, run your next swat and let me know how it goes. 6. Create your Momentum Plan: Here we have our strategy planning worksheet, very simple. Here we have it. We finished up with our little refresher on how to set better goals, how to understand what we're as strategically, and even there I say, understand the data that can tell us whether we're on the right track. But now, how do we make a plan? Excellent question. Here's the answer. We start writing down everything we know. This is a very simple project, but hopefully it can give you lots of clarity. After we write down which month we're focusing on, we're going to write down our win. Our win can be a growth win, which is basically any way that we expand, it can be type of goals that are related to new audiences or customer growth. As a leverage win might be a win that you want to focus on instead that is focused more on engagement, current customers and retention. After we write down the win for our upcoming month, this is where we write down strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then from the intersection of those, we identify actions. Then based on our ICE, we will see where we need to focus on. You're just going to do this by following what we talked about in our SWOT lesson. But before we look at the numbers, I want us to get really clear on based on that goal. What is a good outcome? Let's say we want to um, you know, build our waiting list for our new product. A good outcome is to get 150 people on that waiting list. A fuckier outcome, excuse my swearing is 500 people on that waiting list. Based on that, we want to identify a couple of ways that we will know whether we are on the right track. KPIs can be something like in this example, getting demo calls. In my opinion for the waiting list, it might be things like, um, uh getting a certain number of emails in, getting a certain number of people to click through the landing page, and then we break it down into the metrics. Where are people coming from? Maybe is your LinkedIn posts. We want to make sure that we know how many people are actually engaging with you on LinkedIn and clicking through your LinkedIn into that landing page. I think this is very important. Think about the KPIs as some of the milestones, some of the things that need to happen to know that we are on the right track. Then the metrics are what is going to tell us whether we need to change our course. See if you need any help, just put your project into the board to get feedback and I can help you identify the difference between the two if you're still a bit confused. The final bit, which is the most exciting for me is momentum. Now that we know the goal, now that we broke it down into two types of outcome to push ourselves bit, we know some of the actions that we need to take, some of the issues that might arise. Can you think about what you're going to do in the next hour? What are you going to do tomorrow? Then each week, what are you going to show up with so that by the end of this month, you will complete something. This will help you reverse engineering whether you are on the right track or not. So I want you to go and have a look and then finish off by look at what your commitment is for the next 24 hours. What is the first thing you're going to do with all the knowledge that you have acquired? I cannot wait to see your actual project and your actual plan for this goal that is coming up for you in the next month. I hope this can help you use some of the strategies that marketers have in their back pockets for the most successful campaigns and apply them to go, any type of business big or small, any type of creative dream that you might have and also giving you a monthly checking that you can go back to again and again, redo and rewatch this class again and again and again to build every single month a great nostr that can support you with your goal.