Planning is prerequisite to achievement. When you’re working toward achieving a goal, there’s a need to develop a plan and work on it to achieve the goal. In Napoleon Hill words, “plan your work and work your plan”. Setting up a plan is the first step to success. It’s like a guide that directs your processes towards the end goal.
Having said that, Marketing goals help your business to succeed by giving measurable KPIs to evaluate team works and contributions which in turn influence end results. Reason why every business must set a marketing goal to guide the business objective toward success.
Here are key tips on setting a marketing goal for your business.
?Evaluate your current position: It’s important to understand your business current position before setting up a new marketing strategy. The key factors here to help in understanding the current position of your company include: What is the business currently doing? How well is the company currently doing the business? How much of the marketing objectives have been achieved so far?… and so on.
?Create a SMART goal: you can’t stop hearing or reading about developing a SMART goal because it is valuable in achieving your set objective. The tenet of this is to guide your goal towards success. A smart marketing goal must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. For example, rather setting a goal of ‘having more followers on Instagram by the end of the year’, you can make it clearer like: Creating an active online presence on Instagram to have 5,000 followers by the end of the year. With the later, the goal specifically stated what will be done to achieve an attainable objective of 5,000 followers (measurable) within a time frame.
?Evaluate your competitors: competitors’ analysis is very vital in understanding how you can develop a unique selling proposition that will help customers choose your brand or products in the marketplace. Who are the major competitors? What are they currently doing or selling? What do they fail to do? How can you leverage on their shortcoming for your business success?…
among others. This will not only help your business to outsmart your competitors but will also help understand their strengths and weaknesses which will give distinctive advantages to achieving the marketing goals for the year.
?Study the Industry shift and trends: Believe it or not, every industry is changing. It’s either you welcome the change or ignore it and make others pass you by. Evolving your marketing strategy around the shift and industry trends will help your business standout and attract more customers who are also adopting the new trends. Prepare for the changes in the industry, follow trends, experiment with the latest change and improve your previous strategy to fit into the current ones. Gets insight into future marketing trends from experts, study analysis and reports, attends seminars and so on to keep informed of industry news and trends.
?Develop a marketing strategy: a well defined marketing strategy will help you reach your objectives with focus. Marketing strategy will define the type contents to be shared, the channel to use, the frequency of the contents, the form of the content for various platforms among others. However, the marketing strategy must be in line with the customers’ needs as well as the marketing goals. Deviating from these can be ineffective for the business success.
?Develop metrics for evaluation: Regular evaluation is a key success to achieving set marketing goals. Evaluation gives rooms to understand the success or failure of your marketing strategy that has been adopted. There’s a need to set how frequently your review and report take place: weekly, monthly, quarterly or biannual reports. Also, there must be metrics to be evaluated in giving reports – reach, engagement, followers, clicks, conversion e.t.c. These are the Key Performing Indexes (KPI) to which the marketing goal will be reviewed, redesigned and reported. Tools like Google Analytics, Moz SEO, HubSpot CRM and others will help you to evaluate your marketing success effectively and efficiently.
End Note
It’s important to note that the step-by-step process can be restructured to fit into the industry style or needs. In other words, there is no one silver bullet or perfect formula in setting these marketing goals; how you set goals will certainly be different for each company, product, team, manager, and client. “Nonetheless, simplicity, focus, authenticity, systems and the ability to consider both your short and long-term vision are key.”, stated Chloe Mason Gray.
David Alonge is a certified digital marketing expert and strategist who build blueprints for businesses and SMEs through content, social media, digital ads; and branding. He consults for organizations and helps them to build and develop strategic frameworks and programs for maximum productivity in business through the application of digital tools and techniques. He is currently the Chief Operating Officer and Strategist at Harlong Digitech.
