brainstorm-prioritize-best-content-ideas

How does your team prioritize marketing projects?

Are you focused relentlessly on nothing but potentially high growth ideas?

Or are your priorities unclear or unproductive, leaving you stuck in a constant scramble?

When crystallized and properly communicated, prioritization can, in some estimates, reduce costs by roughly 15 percent and improve your team’s capability to meet your marketing goals.

What is the process to truly remarkable ideas and ruthless execution?

Million-dollar gap between 10x and 10%

Because the goal of any marketing program should be to drive profitable customer action, the best marketers prioritize high-potential growth projects over incremental improvements.

Our team adopted a simple process that helps us do exactly that – the 10x vs.10% framework. A 10x project multiplies the results by a factor of 10. A 10% project improves results by a measly 10%.

A 10x project can positively impact a huge number of people in your audience and produce incredible revenue returns for your business. If plotted on an x-y chart, a 10x project falls high on the upper-right quadrant:

10x-project-example

A 10% project, on the other hand, provides a little bit of value to a few people. Looking at things this way provides a framework for understanding and predicting impact. And therefore, it’s perfectly suited to help you prioritize which projects to take on and which ones to take a pass on.

At CoSchedule, the startup I co-founded, you’ll hear this mantra daily: “Think 10x. Forget 10%.” Prioritize the work you do to reach your marketing goals 10 times faster. Don’t do the trivial minutiae that sucks productivity and fails to drive growth.

You see, the goal of 10x projects is to drive positive outcomes, not perfection. The goal isn’t flawless work; it’s effective work with huge results.

Why?

Cost of losing focus

Research from the University of London found a person’s IQ drops when multitasking as much as 15 points. Another study shows task switching can cost up to 40% of someone’s productive time.

According to the researchers, the evidence suggests two processes are involved in task switching that explain the negative effects. The first is a goal-shifting stage, which happens when we decide to move from one task to the next. The second is a rule-activation stage in which the mind must wrap around the parameters for a new task.

These stages are awesome to help you navigate between tasks. However, the productivity costs become enormous when you bounce task to task. Chasing down a 10% task is incredibly expensive.

Now, there are two big questions to answer:

  1. What does a real-life 10x idea look like (results included)?
  2. How do you consistently generate and prioritize them?

A 10x project looks like this

At CoSchedule, a core component to drive growth was our email list. We asked ourselves, “What can we do to grow our email list 10x?”

We looked at what information we had. Our tool had north of a million headlines with social share data for each. Through intensive research, we boiled down the best into a formula for our team. Next, we built an algorithm to automate the formula and score the…