Whether you are trying to boost social media engagement, grow brand awareness, increase website conversion rates, or generate new leads, having defined marketing goals for your efforts is important. Without a defined marketing goal, your team may become misaligned, focusing on individual efforts instead of your overall goal.
Marketing Goals Outline the Intentions
Having a clear goal helps make clear the intentions of your organization when you have an internal marketing team or are hiring a marketing agency. Knowing the intentions for growth helps the marketing team determine where to focus their resources and energy. When working with clients, we believe it is important to establish marketing goals before outlining the services we recommend. If a business is looking to bring in new clients our recommendations for marketing services will be entirely different from the client who has a maxed-out client load and is looking to increase revenue per client.
Goals Provide a Way to Measure Success
Without a marketing goal, you cannot prove your efforts were successful. If you have ever spent money on a marketing campaign and then struggled to answer, “was it worth it,” you are not setting clear enough goals. Setting goals can be more complicated than one initially wants to believe. Goals that follow the “from x to y by when” model are a great starting point, but there is more. It is important to set realistic, achievable goals.
For example, if you set the sales goal of “increase annual first-time sales from $300,000 to $500,000 by the end of the calendar year” that’s great! However, over the past two years, your annual first-time sales have only grown each year by $20,000. In this scenario, it’s important to have a concrete plan for how you plan to go from an average of roughly 7.5% to 67% growth. If you aren’t making major changes to the status quo, you shouldn’t expect to see major changes in the outcome.
Steps to Achieve Your Marketing Goals
Even if you have a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART), you are not guaranteed to succeed.
- Generate Team Buy In | If at all possible, have your team assist in the process of determining the team goals. Teams without buy-in are more likely to lose focus of the goal.
- Consider the Whirlwind | The Whirlwind was made popular by FranklinCovey and it discusses the importance of the day-to-day activities that need to be completed for the business to run. Never set a goal that doesn’t first consider the essential action items a team has to complete.
- Create Bite-Sized Milestones | After establishing your goal, create smaller milestones that can act as stepping stones to the larger goal. When each of those milestones is achieved, celebrate the success to keep your team motivated.
- Set Up a Scoreboard | Create a scoreboard that measures the team’s progress toward the goal. Allow all team members to check whenever they want. This generates ownership and creates a visual reminder of how close or how far away from the goal you are. Report on this progress weekly or monthly to ensure you are on track!
Whether you need help setting goals or implementing marketing campaigns to achieve your goals, our team of dedicated marketing strategists can assist and help your business grow!
WORK WITH US!
Interested in working with Innereactive on an upcoming project? Complete the form below and a member of our team will reach out shortly to set up a meeting.
Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.