Wil Reynolds is the founder & director of strategy at Seer Interactive, a digital marketing agency. He has worked across every vertical, including pharmaceuticals & hospital systems to e-commerce and SaaS. With over 15 years experience doing and talking about search, he loves to speak at conferences about the future of search, and tends to lead his agency to think about search through different lenses.

Celebrate Outcomes Not Outputs

In this video, Wil talks about how identifying and focusing on your outcomes vs. your outputs can help your business stay on track and remain true to the reasons you started your company in the first place.

A Single Blog Article isn’t a Thriving Online Community

For example, Wil’s wife owns and operates a non-profit company that helps less-fortunate people in Nicaragua obtain clean drinking water — on a side note, someone should put Wil’s wife in touch with Flint, Michigan. Like many non-profits, they take “success photos” of donors and the clean water pumps they install, but as Wil points out that’s not the output and not the outcome.

Wil’s point is that celebrating the output of your work is the wrong thing to celebrate. Instead of celebrating the clean water equipment they should be celebrating the improved health of Nicaraguans over the next 10 years. For your online business, that means focusing on end-results rather than short-term solutions.

Celebrate Outcomes Not Outputs

Instead of throwing a pizza party because your Tuesday blog roundup hit 100 likes consider company-wide bonuses — which could be monetary or something like paid time off, a company outing, etc. — when you’re able to measure how all your blog posts added up to x-many new clients and y-amount more yearly revenue because of it.

The Digital Marketing Playing Field is Equal

Seek out your borders. Plan before you perspire. Don’t confuse your outcomes with your ouputs. Put together your to-do list with outcomes and mind and never forget what your outputs are there to achieve.

Let this thought sink in… Usain Bolt is one of the fastest men on Earth. He’s a gold medal Olympic sprinter.

You could beat Usain Bolt in a race…

… if he ran the wrong way for just 5 seconds.

Digital Marketing is a Neverending Process

Digital marketing is a never-ending process. It’s not a hit-it-and-forget it one-time event. It’s waking up every day and grinding out more outputs and better quality outputs than your competition, so when your competitor takes a step in the wrong direction, you’re in position and poised to take the lead.

There’s a quote that goes…

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the lion or the gazelle today. When the Sun comes up, you better be running.