Apart from writing, my day job is in brand marketing, with digital marketing being my expertise.

At this point in 2022, you can almost consider anything to have a digital component to it. Within digital marketing, I focus on advertising in spaces such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. I also focus on regular banner or video ads you’ll see while scrolling through an article, watching your favorite show on Hulu, or listening to a station on Spotify. With so many options for brands to place their ads, it’s very easy to just want to do it all. Be everywhere, for everyone, so that your brand is something that people remember and ultimately purchase from. 

Let’s take the example of a local printing business. This business isn’t new to the printing space, but they would like to increase their number of customers. They also want to promote their new offerings, and they also want to increase sales for their current offerings. It’s a lot to do. 

While these hopes and desires are extremely admirable and achievable, it is difficult to achieve them without a clear idea. One marketing campaign won’t always achieve so many objectives. Why is that? Because we don’t know the specific goal. 

At my previous job, my boss would always begin every planning meeting with that question. We would meet with teams who had so many ideas for what they wanted the brand to achieve for that year. He would always respond with the same question. “Okay, but what’s the goal?” For a while, I used to think that maybe he wasn’t understanding the goal, because there was already so much information already communicated to him. Over time I learned that this lack of clarification wasn’t coming from his side, it was actually coming from the source itself. Similar to the example that I gave on the local printing business, these teams would not have a clear goal in mind of what they wanted to achieve. They had many goals, but they couldn’t be achieved with just one marketing campaign or one cool idea. 

For such a simple question as it is, how often do we stop to ask ourselves what the goal is for what we put our time into. That is where the real intention lies. One example that sticks out in my mind that used to always hover over my head is paying off student loans. 

With student debt becoming an unfortunate norm for a lot of people, I told myself that I wanted to pay them off by a certain date. That was the goal, or so I had thought. 

It wasn’t until I was speaking with one of my mentors that she asked me, “What’s the real goal?” I thought I was being pretty clear when I said I wanted to pay off my loans. Similar to my previous boss, I thought that she just wasn’t understanding. After some back and forth, I realized that the misunderstanding was coming from my side. I didn’t understand the question. The more we dug into it, we uncovered that the goal wasn’t to pay off loans. 

The goal was to be financially free. 

While paying off student loans was a step in that direction, it wasn’t the goal and it certainly wasn’t the only way I would get to financial freedom. I could easily choose to go into more debt after paying off my loans, even if I had achieved that initial “goal.” 

Financial freedom, however, would come from more than just that. It can come from investments, multiple income streams, and many other things that I wasn’t thinking about. 

While paying off my student loans would make me feel like I achieved the goal and is still an achievement, I wouldn’t have achieved the real goal. While the local printing business may have put out an all encompassing ad campaign, they may not have achieved all of their initial goals. 

There are many experts that talk about the best ways to achieve goals, and I am definitely not a subject matter expert. What I do know is that without an intentional goal, you can only get so far. 

A goal to work out so that you can look good and impress others may seem cool for a while, but when there’s no one to impress, you may need to look a little deeper. A goal to make all the money in the world so you can buy you some awesome stuff is great, but will it ever be enough? These can all be secondary benefits. They’re all okay, but what’s the goal?