Howdy Friends,
I was listening to a Target Internet podcast last week. Daniel was interviewing Meta’s CMO, Alex Schultz, about his new book. It was a good listen, and one thing he said really stuck with me. Marketing channels will change, but marketing fundamentals never do. That truth has stuck with me. No matter how you are marketing, the basics are the same.
The basic principal that stood out to me the most was setting goals. Anyone marketing without goals is throwing money to the wind. You can’t measure what you never defined. When you can’t measure results, you don’t know whether you are coming or going.
We get caught up in a lot of vanity metrics that don’t mean anything unless they’re tied to a real outcome. 100 likes don’t pay the bills. 50k views don’t mean sales. Even the posts that get shared and commented on rarely move the needle if there isn’t a clear next step attached. It feels good to see traction, and it’s easy to mistake that buzz for progress. But the only numbers that matter are the ones that show you’re getting closer to your goal.
Metrics aren’t goals. Goals are actions that grow your business. Lead submissions. Sales. Email sign-ups. Calls booked. These are the things that connect directly to revenue. Without them, you’re just collecting noise.
If you want to build a working marketing plan, start by naming one goal you can track and setting a realistic number for it. Maybe it’s 30 leads, $5,000 in new sales, or 100 email sign-ups per month. Whatever it is, write it down and give yourself a time frame. Then start tracking how close you get in each time period. It doesn’t matter if you use fancy software or a yellow notepad on your desk. What matters is that you check the numbers and pay attention.
Remember, if you can’t track it, you can’t test it. And if you can’t test it, you don’t know what’s really working.
Let’s say you want 100 leads per month but you’re getting 75. You think your ad copy might be the problem, so you make a change and let it run for a couple weeks. Then you check your numbers again. Did your leads increase or drop? The test data tells you if the change was an improvement. That’s how you move from guessing to knowing.
When your results don’t move in the right direction, sit back and review the path to your main goal. Ask yourself where things are falling apart. Are people clicking but not filling out your form? Are they reading but not taking action? Once you find the weak link, fix it and test again. Sometimes a small change, a clearer call to action, better landing page layout, or simpler message, makes all the difference.
Marketing isn’t magic. The folks who get it right aren’t more talented or better funded. They’re paying closer attention to the basics. They set goals, they measure outcomes, they tweak what needs tweaking, and they repeat the cycle. Every successful campaign—be it for a global brand or a small-town contractor—follows those same fundamentals.
The rest is just noise.
If you find yourself frustrated with marketing, stop and go back to those basics. Set one clear goal. Measure it honestly. Adjust based on what you learn. Keep doing that, and you’ll start seeing steady, predictable improvement instead of wild swings. And if all this still feels like a maze, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes you’re just too close to the problem to see what’s unclear.
Take 10 minutes today to write down one clear goal and the numbers that prove it. You’ll be amazed how fast things start to make sense.
Later, Chad Beachy