The baseline strategy is premised off the concept that “Effort = Results”.

In essence, whatever effort you put out is going to produce the results that you achieve. With few exceptions, most of us would be willing to agree that this is a solid equation. If I want to increase the results that I'm getting (e.g. generate more revenue, lose more weight, etc), I'm going to have to remember my basic math. When solving for x, whatever you do to one side of the equation, you must do to the other. So, if I want to change my results, I'm going to have to change my effort.

Now, here's the thing, you don't always have to increase effort. Sometimes you can take things away that aren't serving you; allowing you to put that energy elsewhere. Doing this will also increase your results. However, as I said before, you must make changes to both sides of the equation. Here's where things get tricky. Often, we have no idea what the effort we're putting in is; we only have a vague idea.

Want proof? What did you do yesterday?

When most people get posed this question, most of us, me included, must take a moment to reconstruct the day.

The problem is when we don't know what effort we're putting in to achieve our results, we can't change it. You must understand what the baseline of your effort is before you can apply strategy adding or removing things from it.

This is the Baseline Strategy.

You can build a baseline strategy for what you need to be doing to accomplish any goal. I find this is where things get fun, so I have a baseline strategy for pretty much everything in my business:

• how I manage my team
• how I manage myself
• how I manage finances
• how I manage our events
  

Basically, the whole nine yards.

Baseline Strategy in Marketing

Let's talk about what baseline strategy means when it comes to marketing. I have a baseline of all the things that we do on a recurring basis to market the business. This allows me to easily look at what results we accomplished at the end of each month and know where they came from. If what we are doing isn’t yielding the desired results, we can either keep it, tweak it, or get rid of it altogether.

Giving you an example of what my baseline looks like for marketing specifically:

• Daily: Post to social media
• Weekly: Create blogs, articles, and videos in long-form
• Monthly:
• Planning and filming session to create the foundation for all the content for the month
• Select a minor project from the ‘marketing projects’ list that is maintained in our project management system
• Quarterly: Attend a marketing mastermind for new ideas
• Twice Yearly: Photo shoot for more material
  

There’s more, but this gives you a great idea!

The Challenge

I want to encourage you to sit down and build out your baseline for marketing today! What are the things you're doing on a recurring basis? Keep track of this because it will grow, and when something is no longer working, you can remove it from the list. If you are interested in learning more about our marketing baseline strategy, let me know in the comments below, and I just might break it down for you.