How should a Digital Marketer utilize Google Goals?
In Digital Marketing, data matters. Executives expect to see results and statements supported by numbers, captured through analytics and marketing automation software.
Google Goals will be a new way for marketers to achieve their long term professional goals and goals for their team in a way that generates measurable results.
What Is Google Goals?
On April 12th, Google announced its new virtual assistant for its app Google Calendar, called Goals, whose mission is to help you prioritize and achieve your goals – goals which you may not have realized you even had the time to achieve.
For marketers to fully utilize Google Goals, you need to have Google for Work in order for Google Calendar to access your work calendar. This move may be a catalyst for enterprises to look to switch to Google.
How Does It Work?
Goals works by asking you what your desired goal is (exercise 3x week? Learn Spanish for your upcoming trip? Practice mindfulness? – all of these were used as examples by Google) and then recording what are the ideal times for achieving your goal, for example, working out for thirty minutes during your lunch break at 12 pm.
In order to work correctly, your calendar needs to be completely filled in. This way, Goals can reschedule your goal if a conflict occurs, such as a meeting popping up unexpectedly. Using machine learning, Goals will become smart to your calendar, and will learn how to program your schedule more efficiently the more you use it.
Further Your Long-Term Marketing Goals
In addition to helping you accomplish your personal goals that may or may not relate to your career, Goals can help accelerate achievement of your strategy and career goals. Often, it is our long term achievement goals – our BIG goals – that get pushed aside or prioritized last when emails need to be sent and meetings need to be attended, especially at an interrupt-driven enterprise.
Long-Term goals can’t be accomplished in a day or even a week. Many of these goals have to involve Enterprise Learning in order to be achieved, and learning a new skill doesn’t happen overnight. What Goals does, however, is accelerate this process.
Marketers can use Goals to further their learning and amplify productivity by setting goals such as:
-Spend 2x a week learning SEO optimization
-Watch a Digital Marketing lynda.com tutorial 2x a week
-Dedicate 1 hour before and after work writing your book on Digital Marketing
Use Goals to Empower Your Marketing Team
Goals can also be used to motivate a team in a way that is convenient for each individual member. Whether you want your entire team to learn a new marketing automation platform in a certain period of time or perfect a new skillset, Goals will enable you to set standards for your team that can then be turned into measurable data.
For example, if you wanted each one of your team members to dedicate 1 hour a day to working on a blog post due by end of day Friday, Goals can help them set aside the time that is convenient for them to do so. By the end of the year, you will be able to track their progress and compare their very first blog to their last. You will be able to see how 260 hours has impacted their writing. It’s a win-win, by the end; your team has improved their writing and you have gained an arsenal of marketers who have polished their content-creating skills.
The Takeaway: Goals Helps Marketers Broaden Their Areas of Expertise
Specialization is quickly becoming a thing of the past. CIOs are no longer just technology strategy experts – they need to be experts at business, too. CMOs have to be tech savvy, as they’re investing thousands of dollars into applications for their marketing teams, and Sales GMs are doing the same for their sales teams. Marketers are already familiar with these kinds of overlap because we use technology to achieve our desired marketing outcomes every day.
As the need to have a wider breadth of expertise increases, and the need to master new forms of technology is a need that will never go away, marketers have to ensure that they don’t fall behind, and Goals will help empower them to achieve this.