For any business setting the right marketing goals are critical to revenue growth and brand adoptions and awareness. There is both the macro and micro goals you must consider, or the strategy and tactics.
The goals might tasks, quotas, improvements in your key performance indicators, or benchmarks.
Setting these goals isn't just helpful for you, but for all the employees, stakeholders, and customers.
These goals are part of your roadmap that lay out exactly what you'd like to accomplish and by when. They should be specific, measurable, and timely (SMART). So how important is it that you write these goals? Extremely.
The authors at CoSchedule determined through their research, "Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don't. And 70% of those successful, goal-setting marketers achieve them." Goals provide clarity and give insight into what your next steps should be.
You'll need to work backwards by defining each objective you're trying to reach. You will then lay out the workflows that lead up to achieving each goal.
It certainly helps to break this down into weekly, monthly, and quarterly objectives as discuss below.
You may divide one objective into three sections. And then divide those three sections accordingly.
For example, one of your goals might be to drive more website visitors. You may want to go from 10k page views per month, to 14k by the end of the Quarter 2, 2020/21.
This can be done by many means, including but not limited too.
With each of these areas, they will have their own KPI's and targets.
By breaking down the macro goal into sections, you start to understand tactically how this can be achieved. The side benefit of which is providing you with the diversified path of attaining the goal. As an example perhaps just creating new and fresh content is enough to lift your website visits.
Breaking the defined goals down into designated areas and tactics will dramatically improve your ability to hit your business goals.
Make sure each goal is measurable. You will need a way to gauge your progress. You can do this by creating graphs, timelines, or charts, for displaying the information you need to track progress.
Should you want an easy to follow plan, you can grab a copy of our free social media, and content plan here. Which beautifully supports a high-level marketing plan.
1. Boosting brand awareness and visibility (Connect with 5,000 new customers)
2. Generating a significant amount of leads generated (Get 500 new leads)
3. Increasing revenue (Increase revenue by 40%)
4. Increase website traffic (Attract 2,000 new visitors)
5. Grow social media followers (Gain 2,000 new followers)
6. Grow email list (Grow list by 30%)
7. More interaction and engagement (Receive 100 completed surveys)
8. Get more ad clicks (Increase clicks by 30%)
9. Increase the number of marketing qualified leads(Increase MQL by 30%)
10. Align the marketing team with the sales team.
11. Increase conversion rate from 2% to 3.5%.
The point of your marketing strategy (3 P's) is to pick, prioritize, and plan projects that correlate to customer action and behaviour.
Now let's take one of these business objectives and break it down.
Let's say we want to increase our website traffic. We may make a list of things that will help boost traffic, such as:
1. Search engine optimize (SEO) content, tags, photos, etc.
2. Create a Pinterest ad that links to the website
3. Create a YouTube video inviting users to the site to interact
4. Create content (such as blogs) that attracts our target audience/customers (content marketing)
5. Send out emails and newsletters with links
6. Create Google and social media advertisements
7. Post links to the website on sites where our target audience hangs out
8. Guest post on other blogs that share our target customers
9. Distribute collateral (brochures, flyers, cards)
10. Hold a contest, event or pass out coupons
11. Spread the word on social media channels
12. Create an offer (free checklist, eBooks) something that attracts visitors to the page
See? With that one objective, we were able to break it down into 12 smaller goals. All of them will help boost website traffic, and in doing so, will create progress towards this goal. It may even help other goals (increasing traffic may lead to more followers, leads, email subscribers, and sales, for example). A lot of the broken down goals will be part of your marketing strategy.
You must have a plan of action and know what you're going to do. Each day, make sure you pay attention to your analytics. It's essential that you see changes and that you understand what is working and what is not.
Set a timeline for a year, then break it down to quarters, months, weeks, and days. If you want 2,000 new followers in 2 months, that's 1,000 a month, or 250 a week. You need to be aware of what you can do each day of the week that will make a difference over time.
No plan is perfect. If you are doing what you believe is right, and your marketing efforts are still not reaching your objective, look for areas that need attention. Or search for areas of strength that you can amplify to compensate for an underperforming area until you can turn that around.
Adjust as needed and if necessary, break down the smaller goals into more goals, and create small plans for each task that leads to the objective.
If the first set of mini-goals did not work, find out why. What are some alternatives, proven practices you could try that haven't been used yet? Then prioritize your plans. You may be able to combine some and kill two or three birds with one stone.
Create your marketing goals roadmap, take a copy of our free plan below. Sometimes not achieving your objective means you are just missing something you do not know about.
If you think that might be the case or have any questions, contact us and we will gladly help you.