5 Ways to Optimize Your Strategy and Get More ROI

1. Diagram the heck out of everything. Create process maps so detailed your dog could write your blog and update your email algorithms. Use a blue marker for sales, a red marker for customer service, and a green marker for marketing. Because green is creative. And marketers are creative, ammirite? Use arrows to show relationships. Use all the arrows. Go big with the arrows. Circle things. This one is REALLY important. You better love this arrow or clean out your desk.

2. Track all of your metrics. How many cups of coffee does your director drink? Is your analyst typing too slowly? Get on that. How many times a day do you complain about how cold the office is? Maybe reduce that. Offer incentives for increasing efficiency. No more bathroom breaks. Maybe your writer could save time by sleeping in the office every Thursday night. Create smoke signals so nobody has to wonder all over the office looking for answers. No phones though. That breaks concentration. Follow your prospects home at night. Personal is good, right? So stalker would be better. Make a massive spreadsheet that’s so big it has to live on the network and takes fifteen minutes to open. Make sure it crashes regularly from all of the metrics.

3. Set team meetings. Once a week, twice a week, everyday. You need to meet. Set meetings about your meetings. Who’s hitting their deadlines? Maybe you need another meeting to talk about deadlines. Everything should be clear, but maybe put the summary of the meeting in an email and cc the entire team because CYA. Have everyone speak at the meeting and share their thoughts on the weather. The weather affects your ROI. Don’t ever forget that.

4. Create graphs. Graphs make things real. And PowerPoint decks. You’re not optimizing unless it’s in a deck. Make sure your graphs include a lot of lines. Lines are powerful. Lines make things happen. The more graphs the better. Make a graph of your graphs and take a survey to determine which graph is the best. Surveys make people feel included. Graph the survey results.

5. Ponder what it means to optimize. And ROI. ROI is hard. Ponder the meaning of life and marketing and really, life is marketing, so ponder that too. Do a lot of pondering. Pondering makes you look smart. Think about optimizing. What’s the Latin root? Ponder Latin. Latin is so strange. How do you diagram Latin? Whiteboard your pondering and then graph the results.

Also, stop writing listicles full of buzzwords about best practices. Marketing is alive and each time we forget that, we end up chasing our tails. You team should crackle with ideas and feel empowered to explore them. If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you’re already behind. It’s never about doing the right thing in marketing; it’s about engaging authentically with your audience in a way that makes them want to buy. Show me playful. Show me actionable. Show me how human your brand is.

Stop all of this optimizing buzzword business. Do good things. Track the good things. Figure out ways to do better things. The end.