For this episode I’m going to use this newsletter as an example. Over a year ago I felt it would be a good idea to start a newsletter. It was a new way for me to grow an audience for my business and to inform my “people’ on my activities and attract new business. Following my own guidance from one of the prior newsletters I pioneered the idea and put it into play. And let me tell you building a newsletter is not an easy thing. There is planning, distribution, scheduling and a lot of writing involved!

Reflecting on this experience I realized that many times in business we do things on auto pilot and we try to finetune the process as you go to make it more effective.

A good way to determine success is to have a good metric in mind before you start the activity so you can measure its success. For me the ROI for the newsletter is reaching a bigger audience and the leading indicator was the number of subscriptions.

Secondly there is always the question if the activity was executed well and whether it had been given enough time to succeed. Any new activity needs time to land and develop. In my case I had determined a six month run time would give me a good indication of success or not.

Then there is the evaluation checkpoint. Before you start your activity, plan a date or time where you will evaluate your process and its performance. This will allow you some peace of mind while running the activity as you know there is milestone for review in the calendar. For me the period was six months. At this point, you need to decide: stop, pivot or persevere.

In good faith, I persevered for an extra two months before I sat down and evaluated this activity. I kept going even though

I knew the newsletter subscriptions started to stagnate after about four months. I may have goofed on my own principle at this point, as I had invested so much into this project already. It was a good idea, but the format, cadence and content needed work.

Organically, after eight newsletters, I stopped efforts and focused on more the pressing needs of the company. But the goals of the newsletter hadn’t changed and there were limited alternative methods. I knew in the back of my mind, the newsletter needed to be revised and restarted.

So here we are, back at it again. An activity that needed a pivot. I’ve taken some the time to contemplate what the new format will look like and now have more hands to help me. We will have the learnings from before, can set new goals and re-evaluate when the time is right. Stop and pivot or persevere to get to momentum.

In this episode I’ve walked you through my thinking on the ROI of a marketing activity for my business. But you can apply the logic to any business process. The whole idea is that you use your resources effectively, trying new things to build success, and when in doubt, consult with experts in this space.

Whatever you do, keep the momentum going by:

• Setting good goals and metrics at the start
• Set evaluation checkpoints (and stick to them!)
• Stop, Pivot, or Persevere: Be flexible and be willing to adapt to the needs of your business and your market.