You want to improve your business’ marketing efforts, and that requires setting the right objectives. It’s important to establish clear, achievable goals to guide your inbound marketing strategy. Otherwise, you’re making it harder on your team to achieve — and even define — success. Here’s some advice on how you can set realistic marketing goals for your company:
Avoid unrealistic or poorly defined goals
It’s important to state your grand objectives to develop your business’ growth and reach over time. These immeasurable aspirations are a good foundation to have — but these are not synonymous with goals and won’t suffice when you’re setting actionable next steps.
Every marketing goal you set should be specific and quantifiable. Aspirations to “generate more website traffic,” have a “high Google ranking,” build “a better brand image,” or “expand our market share” are worthy starts, but don’t make those the extent of your goals.
One tactic to help create specific actions is to use the SMART method to set goals. Ensuring goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely will help guide both the marketing team and the supported business units in developing the strategy.
Choose a specific, reasonable timeframe
Part of creating SMART goals is to choose a sensible target timeframe. It should be soon enough to create a sense of urgency among your marketing team, but far away enough to give their efforts time to pay off.
Another key component of successful marketing is setting a reasonable timeframe to accomplish the goal. For example, digital campaigns typically don’t begin to “level out” with consistent results for 90 days. Depending on the market, leads may take several months to cultivate and close. An important question to answer before setting the goal is “what do we need to accomplish and how long does it ‘typically’ take to measure the results?
In addition to setting your general goals for the end of your marketing campaign, benchmarks for key metrics is also critical to defining what will determine if a campaign is successful. Benchmarks may include traffic, leads, or further down the marketing funnel to the number of new customers acquired. Be sure to monitor the campaign so it can be adjusted or updated, as needed, to maximize results.
Don’t isolate your goals
Don’t develop your marketing goals in a bubble, as they are a part of your business’s strategy to grow or retain customers. Goal creation should involve all key players in your company who can speak for their respective sectors.
Why is this important? Your marketing goals should complement other objectives within the company, such as brand goals, sales goals, and customer retention goals. When setting goals, sales and marketing objectives should be aligned from creation to conversions to ensure they complement each other and accelerate the results vs. work independently or even at odds with each other.
Monitor progress
Now that you’ve set your goals and when you aim to achieve them, monitor your progress as you roll out your strategy. It’s important to keep an eye on how your team’s marketing efforts are paying off.
Are you not advancing toward your targets on time to meet the benchmarks you set? If needed as you monitor results against goals and benchmarks, adjust your tactics to reach your goals — or change your goals altogether. Being responsive to the results, and flexible, is paramount to success in marketing. If goals become obsolete, change them.