Being Aggressively Conservative

In order to determine whether your marketing initiatives are successful, you need to define a clear goal to measure success against. 

But how do you put your finger on that goal number? How do you take what you know about your company, assess the data, and pull out an attainable, realistic goal that you can truly hold yourself accountable to meeting? 

You don’t have to pull a number out of thin air – the key is taking what I call an “Aggressively Conservative” approach. 

Aggressively Conservative goals start with high-quality data. Think back to the Challenging Assumptions Landmark – assuming you’re not bullying the facts, you can be confident in what you know about your company and your ideal customers. Layer those key insights with the data from the Channel Confidence Landmark to assess your likelihood of reaching your ideal customers through a given channel.

Where this information intersects, opportunities will poke above the surface:

“Hey! We only need to find X amount of people in our target audience, which exists in this lane and only costs Y. If we enter this lane, the math is clear – we can earn Z potential revenue.”

Resist the urge to second-guess this projection – it’s backed by solid reasoning and high-quality data, so you should feel good stating it with confidence. That’s the “Aggressive” part of being Aggressively Conservative. 

But the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Expect disruption. Plan for the plan to not go to plan. Be conservative in your projections, thus leaving a buffer for when things go wrong. That’s the “Conservative” part of setting an Aggressively Conservative goal.

Curious what the Aggressively Conservative approach to goal-setting looks like in action? I’ll share an example in the video below.