Imagine If You Had to Give a 100-Day Press Conference on Your Accomplishments
Today is April Fools Day. Sorry, no jokes. The only joke about right now is that an infinitesimal amount of people are still working on their New Year’s resolutions. Plus, this is the end of the first quarter of the 2021 business game. How are you scoring for 2021 (or is it still 2020)?
Rear view of man with note on his back
There is a reason the first day of spring is the second-most popular day for setting resolutions for the year. That’s because most of us have long forsaken any hope of continuing our first-of-the-year resolutions and business plans.
Here are the top 10 goals I found for 2021 as curated by many surveys:
- Regularly updating website content
- Generating qualified leads
- Researching customers
- Creating more engaging content
- Adopting mobile-first strategies
- Fulfilling privacy regulations and web compliance
- Improving website user experience
- Targeting website to users, rather than internal audiences
- Content distribution strategy
- Measurement of marketing efforts
I watched the first President Biden press conference. It happened 65 days into his presidency, and he was asked why he hadn’t achieved many of the pressing needs of the country. Imagine if you had to have a press conference for your first 100 days of 2021.
Behavioral scientists have a name for the constant need to set dates for beginning new commitments: It’s called The Fresh-Start Effect. We need a clean slate to restart our efforts and achieve goals.
So let’s restart 2021 today and start with a clean slate. What needs to be accomplished?
- Fresh content
- Fresh look at mobile-first strategies (Google is shifting all website indexing from desktop to mobile-first in 2021.)
- Fresh look at customers and potential customers through research
- Fresh look at new regulations around privacy, data-sharing and compliance
- Fresh look at the omni-channel marketing environment and establishing a plan to use it
Spring is here and so is the second quarter. It’s time to gain marketing momentum for the year — and measure our accomplishments. The clock in this game is always running.
Mark Mathis III is chief creative & strategy officer, partner and cofounder of AMPERAGE Marketing & Fundraising.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.