Marketing Strategist
Brand Acceleration, Inc.
This year, Brand Acceleration is asking you to take a different approach to your goal-setting process. Instead of trying to establish a bunch of new habits at once, we’re challenging you to focus on just a few vital tasks at a time.
This idea for this was inspired by The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin – a book I received at the first Women’s Economic Development Network Learn and Lead event. In the book, Rubin describes her mission to focus on her goals one month at a time. She grouped together goals that served a common purpose – connecting with friends and family, improving her mental health, improving her physical health, etc. – and worked to accomplish her goals strategically.
That’s what we’re doing here – breaking up a long list of goals into manageable bites. Each month will have a theme like growing your social media network, sprucing up your website, improving your elevator pitch, and more. We’ll give you 3-5 actionable items that will be easy to either complete right away or work into your existing routine.
January is the only month that will have a long-form explanation like this as we don’t want to a) stop giving you our regular blog content or b) double the number of blogs we’re asking you to read. In the future, the Monthly Marketing Challenge will appear as a graphic at the bottom of our monthly blogs and in our monthly emailer. We’ll also post it on all of our social media accounts.
This January, we challenge you to lay the groundwork for tracking – in detail – all of the conferences and professional development events you will go to this year. Create an Excel spreadsheet in which you’ll list every event you attend and how much it costs for you to go (make sure you include travel, food, registration, sponsorships, etc.). Then, identify the factors that make an event beneficial to you. Maybe that’s quality networking opportunities, education sessions, or site selector meetings. This list is yours, so it’s up to you what makes a conference “good.”
When you get home from an event, immediately rate these factors on a scale of 1-10. At the end of the year, you’ll have a detailed analysis of every event you attended. Based on this information, you can critically analyze your 2021 event calendar. Maybe there was an event that just… wasn’t worth the money for the quality of education you got.
This isn’t meant to be difficult. I know we put the word “challenge” in the name, but think of it more like challenging yourself to do just these things. Instead of powering through a long list of goals and ticking boxes, focus on making these things lasting habits.
If you want to learn more about our Monthly Marketing Challenge, you can listen to episode #2 of the Brand Acceleration podcast here.
