ParaCore’s Bi-annual Goal: 200 Leads

When ParaCore first started we didn’t even really do strategic planning. It was basically me and a couple business partners and an employee or two. And as ParaCore’s grown, we’re 11 employees now, not huge but a decent number of people, I found that getting everybody involved in the planning process is incredibly helpful. And we did it for the very first time this year in January, it’s currently June, where I brought the entire office into strategic planning which I had traditionally done with just me and maybe three other people in the office, people that have been here a little bit longer.

And what I learned through that process was that getting everybody involved really just got everyone invested in what was happening in the year and what was upcoming and what is gonna take place for the next six months and 12 months. And so today we had Troy Henson come in from EVOC Consulting who was amazing, he’s a business coach and helps teams work through strategic planning for the upcoming year, and did our planning session. And it was amazing just as it always has been, and every time we do it with the entire company I realized how important it is.

And so I just wanted to show you one thing which is our board, which is what we’re gonna be working on in the next six months of 2018. Alright so this is our board and as you can see we have a number of celebrations here on the left side. We got a new office, we hired two AMs, we’re focusing on our video strategy, we launched a podcast for speaking at Arrival which is an event for outdoor venture marketing. We have a ton of proposals with really good clients, we appoint a Google tag manager, the team’s very cohesive, overall accountability. So on our celebrations side of the board this is where everybody in the office got to come together and say hey, this is what we’re doing great and it was really exciting to see that because it’s not just me touting what’s going on or anyone else, it’s the entire office coming together.

Here we have big rocks observations from the last six months and these were a couple things that we struggled with. So we had too many rocks, there wasn’t full commitment in some areas. We didn’t have clear defined metrics for a few of the rocks, we had some staffing changes and that caused speed bumps. We chose rocks that weren’t aligned with our overall vision, which is a year of recognition for us. We lacked some strategy and structure and then the office move was a bit of a distraction. So we talked about that, then we started talking about different metrics that fall into what do we wanna do by the end of the year.

And we ended up with we wanna have 200 leads or referrals by the end of 2018. That’s actually for the next six months, in the first six months I think we had 126. We wanna do 200 leads in the second half of the year, so that’ll put us at like 325 leads for the year. So if we get to 200 leads, we’ve won. We’ve won for the year, and this is our biggest focus. And so what we decided is that every single team member is gonna be involved in these three rocks, these three core areas. So we have our social media plan which is organic social brand awareness campaign which is paid social. And then we wanna try and do some sort of non-digital marketing campaign, so someone said flash mob. I don’t know if that’ll be it, there didn’t seem to be a ton of excitement around that but that’s a cool idea. Someone else also mentioned doing a Superbowl commercial in a very small market that only costs $500 ’cause then we can say we got a Superbowl commercial. We talked about doing a billboard or like bus signs, you know something just like a little bit unusual that might actually generate some PR. And so then we all decided alright, well how are we gonna do that?

So we have big rocks observations, we decide we wanna get 200 leads then we said in order to do that we really need to kick up our social media plan, paid marketing, non-digital marketing. I’m already doing a lot of content on YouTube which is what you’re seeing right now so we’re gonna be using that as content. And then we said how are we gonna do that, and we’re gonna be engaging in Facebook groups, daily posts, we’re gonna send a number of emails per week, ask for connections to clients’ vendors so that we can just learn from them and connect with more people in the industry, taking photos, social media. So really what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to amp up our digital social media game, which is what we do for our business but it’s kind of a cobbler’s son has no shoes sort of deal. And you know unfortunately that just kinda tends to be the case where you’re doing a lot of work for your clients, or doing all their digital media plans and then you’re not following your own digital media plan. And so for us, we’re doing a ton of video content like this video right now. We’re gonna be pushing that content on YouTube, that’s gonna be our main hub of content. And then we’re gonna be distributing that across different channels, so primarily LinkedIn. We’re spending a lot of time on LinkedIn this second half of the year. Facebook paid ads, and then obviously retargeting and some things like that that we’re doing.

So as an agency, as 11 people that’s how we did our strategic planning. That was a mid year strategic plan which was only a half day session, and then at the end of the year we’ll do a little bit longer one which will be one or two days, I’m not sure which. So anyway if you have any questions or comments or just found that interesting, please like the video. As always subscribe, and leave a question in the comments below if you have any. Thanks a lot.