The new year is right around the corner and now is the perfect time to set goals for your business—specifically, marketing goals.
However, as many know, planning ahead can be one of the most challenging aspects of running a company. You can’t afford to get off track as effectively setting marketing goals can make or break the trajectory of your business.
Whether you want to focus on influencer marketing or crushing Google advertising in 2024, we’re going to teach you how to set marketing goals by sharing five helpful tips.
Ready? Let’s get into it!
The Importance of Setting Marketing Goals
Setting marketing goals is the first step in any successful marketing strategy, assuming you and your team are willing to work to achieve them.
Your big-picture marketing strategies provide your team with direction, purpose, and a clear roadmap to guide their efforts. Goals that are specific and measurable can help track your business’s performance and therefore evaluate its effectiveness.
Setting the right goal can also help you make data-driven decisions, with one example being the proper allocation of your resources. Your marketing budget should probably be around 9.1% of your company’s total revenue, but whether or not you spend that money wisely will come down to the marketing goals you set.
Lastly, setting marketing goals and objectives can help you assess potential risks and challenges. You’ll uncover many potential obstacles as you plan for the year, and identifying them in advance will afford you the time needed to tackle them proactively.
How to Set Marketing Goals
Goal-setting for future digital marketing campaigns can be daunting, but there are some tips and tricks you can follow to make the process easier:
1. Be S.M.A.R.T.
SMART is a popular goal-setting acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Allow us to break it down even further:
- Specific: Focus on one specific metric or key performance indicator.
- Measurable: Ensure you can measure your output against the metric you set.
- Attainable: Goals should be achievable within a given timeframe.
- Relevant: Your goal should be aligned with your business’s current objectives.
- Timely: Set a deadline for when you will achieve your metric.
SMART goals can benefit your marketing campaigns and those executing them. They’ll ensure your marketing efforts produce results, while also ensuring those who doing the work have the time and resources to achieve these business goals!
2. Know Your Marketing Objectives
The whole purpose of setting marketing goals is to support your business objectives—you need to make sure yours are supporting the master plan!
Let’s say one of your objectives is to increase brand awareness. Some marketing goals examples that would support this could revolve around creating social media publishing schedules that balanced branded content with more organic UGC-style posts.
Setting a bunch of goals may seem productive, but they won’t lead to anything tangible unless they support your overarching objectives.
3. Leverage Use Historical Data
Historical data is crucial for forecasting and analyzing if your business’s growth is in line with projected industry-related metrics. It will also help you understand market trends better and make informed decisions on how to attract new customers.
When setting marketing goals, you and your team should look at current data sources as well as historical data to understand the bigger picture. This will help inform your decision by giving you an understanding of trends, ensuring your marketing teams won’t waste time on a product or service that won’t yield positive results.
4. Remember the Customer
When learning how to set marketing goals, it’s important to never lose sight of who matters most: the consumer you’re trying to reach. While it can be easy to get wrapped up in your internal processes and lose touch with them, you have to focus.
The best way to stay on track is by setting marketing goals with them in mind. For example, planning to improve the customer journey with better e-commerce web design, or reaching them better with more authentic social media marketing.
If you’re ever feeling lost, let your target audience be your compass!
5. Embrace New Technology
As you’ve probably gathered, setting marketing goals can be a big challenge for even the most experienced marketing team. With that in mind, you can make the process easier by embracing the latest and greatest technology.
Whether you’re looking to increase revenue or attract new customers, it can be worth exploring how emerging tools can help you plan and accomplish them. For example, you could look at using generative AI to help you plan content, or, perhaps, explore how certain AI tools can be used to help with search engine optimization.
Think about it this way: as you plan for the future, shouldn’t you also be looking to use the tools from the future, too? Take advantage of what’s at your disposal!
Have a Marketing Goal? We’ll Help You Achieve It!
This concludes our lesson on how to set marketing goals. As you’ve learned, it’s important to be SMART, objective-oriented, and customer-focused. However, with all that being said, executing your awesome goals can be hard—but we can help.
The Influence Agency is your one-stop shop for all things marketing. No matter what your marketing goals and objectives are, you can count on our team of experts to help you through all stages of the process. 360 digital elevation is what we do best!
If you want to build a marketing strategy that works, contact us today!