Rhythm Blog | Alicia Croke

Recently, our digital marketing team sat down and talked about our annual plan. Marketing departments have many campaigns they focus on throughout the year, so we broke our campaigns down over four quarters. We track our marketing campaign performance over four main drivers: emails, website design, social media, and SEO. We break those down into team KPIs and then even further down into individual KPIs for team members.

I thought I would share just a few digital marketing KPI examples from our session. In addition to using to our own free comprehensive KPI guide for help, we did source some of our KPIs from Hubspot and Impact Branding. The two areas I will focus on are email performance and Social Media.

In the past year, employee engagement has been a hot topic: how to encourage employees, how to measure it, and why it's important. Not so much has been mentioned about what not to do. How do you avoid decreasing employee engagement? I did some research on common employee engagement blunders and pulled them together for you.  Ad you implement your employee engagement action plan, make sure that it doesn't include any of the below! 

Every week you sit down with your team and discuss what you need to get done to be effective. How often do you enter the meeting dreading it or leave it feeling burnt out? When you meet with your team, you should focus on fixing problems and not statusing your projects. At Rhythm Systems, we use a few KPIs religiously at our weekly adjustment meetings. Check them out below!

As Annual Planning approaches for many companies, leadership teams are sitting down to develop their goals for 2018. How was your 2017? Did you get everything accomplished that you had hoped? Are you closer or farther away from your BHAG?

To develop a stronger leadership team in 2018, start with Annual Planning. Watch out for the three leadership mistakes below during your Annual Planning meeting to have a constructive session!

The term activist investor has been floating around Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal for a while now. Activist investors are turning up the heat in companies all over the market, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Buffalo Wild Wings. What exactly is an activist investor? What do they do and how do they impact your business?

According to Investopedia, "An activist investor is an individual or group that purchases large numbers of a public company's shares and/or tries to obtain seats on the company's board with the goal of effecting a major change in the company." 

The Human Resource budget is one of the biggest budgets a CEO sees on his desk every day. Gallup "estimates that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year." 

As a CEO, you are constantly under pressure to meet shareholders' needs and stay under budget. Your human capital is one way to keep a healthy chunk of your budget in check. Our CEO, Patrick Thean, shared with me some ways a successful CEO should think about Human Capital Management.

Recently, our team sat down with our some of our panelists for our Women In Leadership breakfast at the upcoming Breakthrough Conference. I was happy to sit back and soak up all the knowledge I could from these inspiring ladies and men. One thing rang through crystal clear from our calls with them: how to manage time effectively with life and business.

Did you know that Charlotte was recently voted as one of the best cities for tech outside of California and New York?

We have all heard for years how women and men experience life differently. Recently, the discussion has shifted more toward how women and men experience their working lives. With workplace gender disparity still hovering at 30%, companies are trying to combat this number with everything they've got.

However, the Wall Street Journal reported that "just 45% think their company is doing the work that is necessary to achieve gender parity. Even fewer report ever having witnessed a manager challenging gender-based language or behavior, or a leader being held accountable for making—or not making—diverse hires."

"Almost four in ten businesses in G7 countries have no women in senior management positions," according to Forbes. 

I am very lucky to work in a company where our executive team is made up of a diverse group of women and men. The women at Rhythm Systems inspire me every day to learn more, be more, and dream more. One way our female leadership empowers other women in our organization is through continuous learning. We constantly share insights, books, and news. In the spirit of lifelong learning and female empowerment, I am sharing 5 of my favorite books by female leaders.