When beginning a new marketing partnership, you’ll discuss with your partner firm what you’re looking to achieve, both in the short and long term. Being able to clearly articulate your goals, no matter how lofty or far-off they may seem, is essential for the firm to get a sense of your priorities, where they can best spend their time and how much they can realistically achieve for you. They may have suggestions of their own on goals to work toward as well.
But here’s the question for today: what if you’re not sure what your marketing goals are? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a few ways you can create meaningful marketing goals for your internal team and for your marketing firm:
You may have entered into a marketing partnership with a vague goal for your company: something along the lines of “we want to bring in more money” or “we want everyone to know our name.” It’s a great start, but these aren’t yet the kinds of goals we want to be working towards. Why? Because those statements are so vague, there’s no way to craft a meaningful marketing strategy around them.
Take some time to figure out why you want these, and how you want to get them. Do you want current customers to spend more money and refer others, or are you looking to reach a new group? How much new money do you want to bring in, and in what time period? When you take the time to answer these questions, you can make a statement like “we want to bring in more money” into an actionable goal like “we want to bring in $500,000 from referral customers by 2018.” Now that’s something we can plan toward.
In order to best motivate your employees and keep your tactics on target, your marketing goals should be achievable. A strong marketing goal isn’t easily within your grasp, but it can be reached with effort. Don’t set your marketing up for failure by declaring that you’ll generate an impossible number of leads in a given time frame, or that you’ll achieve a given reach for a fraction of the usual cost and effort. Instead, find balance. Look at your marketing resources and set goals that are achievable and set a sustainable pace of growth.
Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this goal?” Will it improve your reputation or broaden your reach? By how much? Consider the ROI of your marketing when setting goals, so that you don’t overinvest in a project with little impact just to say you did so. Rather than pushing for a disparate set of goals at one time, take a look at all of your ideas together and select the ones that reinforce each other and create the best total impact.
Work with your marketing partner to evaluate historical marketing data from your organization and set goals based on past performance. What has been working? What hasn’t? What KPIs have you been tracking, and are you still interested in them? The more robust data on past performance that you can offer, the better informed your goals will be. You may even find that areas you’ve been focusing on—say, generating new leads—is doing well, and it’s time to divert focus to another area of marketing to ensure your brand is uniformly strong.
Your firm can also make recommendations based on industry expertise, and share strategies that they’ve seen work for similar organizations.
For a look at how Movéo helped one brand move from far-off goals to a new website, read our case study on Hallstar.
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