How to Set up Marketing Goals?

Marketing is a major key to growing your brand. With so many different channels to market your brand on, it is important to set goals. Identifying and achieving the marketing goals you have set for yourself, and your business is no easy task. There is so much time, effort, and thought that needs to be put into planning preparation and execution of marketing goals. Let’s now take a look at what exactly a marketing goal is, why you need them, and how to set one. By the end of reading this article, you will be able to set compelling marketing goals tailored to your business needs.
marketing goal planning

What is a Marketing Goal?

A marketing goal is a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time constrained goal, that is designed to improve the efficiency and function of every effort in marketing.  Every marketing plan and initiative should have a marketing goal.  These marketing goals need to be very specific in their intent, each one targeting one singular aspect of the marketing strategy.  Next these goals need to be measurable.  Creating a marketing goal is useless if you can’t measure how you did.  Once you are able to measure how you did, you can figure out what works or what doesn’t.  Thirdly that goal needs to be attainable, you have to structure your goal so that you are able to reach it, implementing different strategies may be a part of securing the attainability of one’s specific marketing goal.  Next, we look at setting a goal that is realistic.  Crunching numbers before broadcasting the goal out, and ensuring those numbers are ambitious enough to encourage hard work, while still being realistic in business and marketing climate.  Finally, your goals need to have a time constraint.  Similar to the first letter in the acronym (S for specific), Your goal needs to have a start and end date.  Having a deadline to reach your goal is an indispensable characteristic of marketing goals.

Before we look at setting a specific intention in marketing, a marketing goal must be identifiedFor a marketing goal to be effective in any business model, a few things need to be kept in mind when setting them.  These are some examples of good marketing goals that meet the SMART standards:

  • Increase website traffic to 1000 page visits a day by the end of August 2020
  • Add 35 new emails to our email list by the end of this week
  • Attain 5 thousand followers on instagram by the start of fall 2020

Where do Marketing Goals come from?

Marketing goals come from a need in the company driven by business goals.  This means that to create a marketing goal that drives every marketing effort, it is essential to relate it back to an existing business goal.  Each and every business goal has the ability to be strengthened by a cooperative marketing goal.  Some business goals your organization may already have are the following:

  • Drive more sales.
  • Grow brand awareness.
  • Expand market share.
  • Develop stronger relationships with stakeholders.
  • Enter new markets or territories.
  • Reach new audiences or demographics.
  • Raise more revenue.
  • Secure funding.
  • Increase profits.

With the development of good marketing goals, the adjacent business goal will flourish.  As a consequence, when done correctly, your marketing and business goals will have a positive reciprocal impact on one another.

thinking of marketing goals

Consumer Chain

There are three main places that you can place your marketing goal along the consumer chain.  The first is at discovery, this is the place to put it if you want to improve the discovery of your product, you are going to be focusing on the largest consumer category.  

  • Generating website traffic
  • Creating a higher social media following
  • Putting out new content
  • Improving first impression advertisements
  • Trying to gain more Email subscribers

If your company has no trouble appealing to the larger population, you may be more concerned with having customers consider a purchase from your site.  You will want to structure your goal in the consideration segment of the consumer chain.  Some examples of targets to reach for in the consideration portion are: 

  • Enticing customers to open emails
  • Have more leads for customers
  • Improving the quality of new and existing leads
  • Generate more clicks on advertisements

Finally, the smallest yet most essential component is conversion.  Converting those many consumers into customers.  Areas you can can target to improve your company’s conversion consist of:

  • Demo and trial sign ups
  • Interactions with customers requesting more information
  • Consultation
  • Following through with purchases

Your marketing goal should target one of these three sectors with a specific intention and strategy in mind.  Additionally, all of the mentioned examples can be measured, allowing for your marketing goals to be tweaked as you are (or are not) seeing results.

Why do You Need a Marketing Goal?

You may be thinking, well why do I need a defined marketing goal?  What if I’m already meeting my business goals? Why can’t I just have this as an internal goal for myself?  Well, let me first begin by telling you that those businesses and companies who set marketing goals for themselves are over 375% more likely to become successful.  Marketing goals not only incentivise harder and more diligent work, but studies show that completing outlined goals will boost team morale!  

You need to set marketing goals to get things done faster.  As previously mentioned, setting a marketing goal involves a time constraint.  Setting that formal constraint within the structure of your goal will encourage your team to put up more effort in a shorter amount of time to complete the goals.  Which in turn, stimulates success at a much higher rate.  

Setting said goals will prevent the aimless team stream from one assignment or task to the next.  With these goals in place, you can alter the structure of your team, or adhere to a different strategy within your business.  These new strategies would only have surfaced as an option in a setting where this specific marketing goal is present.  

Finally, setting marketing goals for each different department in your company means, rather than the teams working independently, they will be able to collaborate in one cohesive unit.  Teamwork is a sought after element in strong and successful business models, setting your tams personal marketing goal undoubtedly will expedite such.

How to set a Marketing Goal?

Now that we have the what or marketing goals, along with the why,our next step is to take a look at how we can set impactful, and effective marketing goals in separate steps.
  1. Begin by selecting a business goal that your company has, (whether it is to get more funding, or to increase awareness in a certain age group etc).  Your business goal will be strengthened by the creation of a marketing goal.  A business goal can be targeted by more than one marketing goal.
  2. Your second step is to look at the ways you are able to link the new marketing goal to the existing business goal. You want your business and marketing goals to work with each other.  Once you have identified a business goal you are going to target with your marketing goal.  Establish what exactly you want to achieve with your marketing goal.  
  3. If you want to gain brand respect and awareness within a certain age range, focus on a marketing goal that will draw in that target audience.  Another example is if you want to get more sales, create a marketing goal where increasing conversion rates is the end target of that goal.    
  4. The third step is to construct your goal.  Now that you have determined your objective.  Write it down and map it out, these visuals will help you set smart goals and will allow others to see the goals you have set for your team.  Add those specific details, add that time constraints, and share your goal with the team.  
  5. The next step is to measure the success of your goal.  A goal is useless if you can’t measure how you did, not measuring your goal is exactly like joining a race and never being able to find out if you won.  You can use analytics tools to see if you are meeting your goals.  
  6. The final key to creating a marketing goal is to construct and reconstruct goals after you finish one.  If you are easily meeting your goals, level them up!  Figure out why it was so easy for you to meet your goal.  Was it a new strategy you tried out? Was it because of the external factors?  Use all these elements to tackle new business opportunities, and capitalize on your company’s unique environment and circumstances.  Make the goals a challenge to achieve!  Similarly, if you’re not meeting your goals, what can you change? Perhaps there’s something missing.  In business you rarely get things right on the first try, and there’s no shame in making adjustments. 
successful business man

Now that you have all the right knowledge to set an amazing marketing goal, go do it! Why not? There are virtually no downsides to setting a well structured marketing goal.  Even give yourself some incentive to set one, create a reward for yourself, treat yourself to a coffee when you complete it.  These tools can be used with any business model, marketing is not an option, so make it fun, achieve your goals and watch your success grow.