The marketing world is fast-paced and ever-changing. Often, before your current campaign has even run its course or perhaps launched, you’re busy planning the next one. It’s all too common to get caught up in the day-to-day grind, strategizing, planning, analyzing, and looking for new ways to increase results while reducing cost. Learning and improving are critical to growing, but it’s also immensely important to celebrate your victories. Let’s look at 6 reasons why you should and how you can actually do this.
1. Desire to Win
Everyone wants to be at his job. We all have a desire to win and want to create successful campaigns. When you achieve success, stop to acknowledge it. Recognize your hard work has paid off and that you were able to accomplish what you set out to do.
2. Desire to Belong
We all have an innate desire to belong. Everyone wants to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, so when you carve out time to celebrate as a team, you’re reminding people they belong. Team celebrations are a great way to strengthen your group and rally them around something good.
3. Desire to Matter
Everyone wants to know that she matters. By celebrating your victories, you have the chance to let each member know that you appreciate all of the hard work and acknowledge how each one helped the team win.
4. Recognize How Far You’ve Come
Growth is often slow, subtle, and quiet. It’s hard to notice in the day to day. By taking the time to celebrate your victories, you create space to look at where you started, where you are now, and just how far you’ve come. This allows you to acknowledge how much your team has learned, changed, and grown.
5. Inspire Gratitude
Victories are not guaranteed, and they hard fought for and won. They don’t happen every day. There’s a lot of failure that happens in between, so when you succeed, celebrate. Remember this is special! Allow your celebration to inspire gratitude. Rest in appreciation of what has been accomplished and of the team who worked so hard to get there.
6. Remember It’s Worth It
Plans change. Unexpected obstacles occur. Deadlines get pushed up and demands increase. While you’re in the middle of projects, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged. By celebrating your victories, you remind your team how good victory feels, that all their effort is worth it.
How do you celebrate your victories?
1. Create Goals
First, you need to create clear goals. You can’t celebrate what you haven’t defined. Make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely). Determine where you want to go and establish a plan to get there. Then, you need to communicate the plan and goals to your team. Let them know what they are working towards.
2. Track Results
Next, you need to track results. In order to monitor your progress towards your goals, you need to create systems to capture responses and treat that data as gold. This information will help you see not only how well you are doing but also how you need to adjust to reach your goals.
3. Analyze Data
We are quick to dissect any campaign that doesn’t perform as well as we had hoped, trying to figure out how we can avoid similar results in the future. But when a campaign performs well, we simply assume we did our job and move on. Rarely do we take the time to examine what went well or how we can repeat that success.
Run a matchback report to see which prospects you targeted actually responded. Are you targeting the right people? Do you need to adjust your territory? What offer are they responding to? Which products are they buying? Sometimes, it’s tempting to look at overall results and move on, but you won’t know what aspects are performing well and which ones are holding you back. Take time to look at each piece of the campaign, so you know how to strategically move towards your goals.
4. Compare Results
Don’t analyze your results in a vacuum. Compare your results to previous campaigns as well as look at year-over-year trends. Have you changed your audience? Products? Offers? What’s going on in the industry that could be adding positive or negative influences?
When results are bad, can you still celebrate?
No one wants to lose, and if you’re not careful, a bad campaign can destroy team morale. While you don’t want to ignore bad results or pretend they don’t matter, you also don’t want to focus solely on defeat. Look for the good things you can call out for your team.
- What You Learned – Every failure is an opportunity to learn. Highlight what you’ve learned from the campaign and celebrate it. You’re closer to better results than you were last time. Success requires practice, dedication, adjustments, and determination.
- Opportunities for Growth – Ask where do we have an opportunity to change or grow? Being able to identify where you can improve is huge! Now, you know what you need to do next time. You can create a plan and start moving towards the goal.
- What You Enjoyed – Nothing is all good or all bad. Ask your team what’s one thing you enjoyed? What’s something you are proud of? These are wonderful to celebrate because they will help reframe your mindset and enable you to pursue more projects you love.
What are some ways to celebrate?
Personal Thank You Notes
Write someone on your team a handwritten note or send them an email. Highlight a specific thing they did, thank them for it, and let them know you appreciate their efforts. Thank you notes don’t have to be long, but make sure they are personal.
Verbal Affirmations
Whether your team members created something awesome, helped you with your project, or rearranged their workload to deliver something you needed urgently. Verbally affirm the good work they did and let them know how much you appreciate them. Don’t just assume they know. Remember, everyone wants to know they matter and voicing your appreciation will go a long way.
Public Celebration
Throw a celebration meeting! Order lunch or bring in treats, go over the positive results, and read out glowing reviews. Recognize each team member’s part in the success and publicly celebrate the victory.
Each team is unique, so try different ways to celebrate your victories and see what people really enjoy. Make it a part of your culture to celebrate victories.
If you need help tracking or analyzing your results, give us a call. We love helping our clients achieve success and giving them lots of reasons to celebrate.