Recently, I became friends with Tatango founder Derek Johnson …
As we talked over lunch, I asked him about the difference between running a start up and working for a corporation.
His response was simple:
“My roommate has been analyzing a large account at work for the past 6 months; hasn’t even made a recommendation on what they should do yet,” Johnson says “One day, we realized that Tatango needed SEO work done to drive organic search traffic, so I began meeting with every SEO expert in the Seattle area and just started doing it.”
Tatango immediately began to make progress on their SEO initiative because they followed a Learn / Execute / Measure / Optimize / Repeat model.
That model being was focused on a Larry the Cable Guy-esque “Git ‘r Dunnn” attitude. That model was comprised of …
Learn: Take the time to educate yourself on the in’s and out’s of your desired subject matter.
Immerse yourself in reading materials — blogs are my favorite and generally most current — and take every single expert in that field out to coffee until you can no longer slurp down another Grande Vanilla Latte.
Show up with questions to guide the conversation. Take notes of the resident experts answers. Don’t forget to pick up the tab (c’mon, it’s a $4 cup of coffee …)
Execute: All those great questions you asked and took notes on? Yeah, put them into action immediately.
The longer you wait, the more time you have waisted in trimming down the advice you’ve been given to build the most efficient and effective plan of attack.
Measure: Learn to develop KPI’s for your business; key performance indicators.
Without these, all the executing in the world won’t matter because you won’t know if you’ve made progress or not.
Don’t waste your time with vanity metrics; Yeah, it’s great to hear that time on site is up 12%, but how does that help your bottom line?
Select “hard metrics” that you can turn into monetary goals. Goals like cost per acquisition, cost per lead and average cost per conversion.
Make the metrics come to life!
Optimize: What’s working? More importantly, what’s not working?
Eliminate whatever is holding you back and invest all your energy and resources into tactics that are paying off (literally).
Let the business-minded metrics do all the decision making for you.
Repeat: What, you thought you’d learn everything there is to know about topic XYZ in one go around?
No!
Continue to educate yourself. Try new things. Measure their success / failure. Pick out the top performers and start all over again!