Your Business Stairway to Success
When building a marketing strategy, goal setting is the first step to follow.
Make a plan and start taking the steps towards your success destination. Read on and we’ll show you the “SMART” way to go about doing this.
A survey of 3200 marketers shows that the marketers who set goals have 376% more possibility of success than those who don’t.
“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”
— Benjamin Franklin
Goals build the foundation of the strategy to reach the desired state. It serves you with the direction for your business to do well in the market. Smart marketing helps reach the target audience and communicate your offerings for the successful acquisition of customers. Therefore, businesses must set specific, clear, and measurable goals.
How to Plan and Achieve Marketing Goals for your Business?
You want to achieve various objectives with your business, such as increased sales, industry recognition, customer loyalty, etc. It may often confuse you with a question- “which one to focus on?”
Well, the answer is simple - you need to strike a balance and watch out for all the goals that matter to you. Also, do note that setting too high goals leads to discouragement, and lowering the goals makes less output for your time and investment. So again, balance is the key to success.
For many newbie marketers and business owners, setting marketing goals can be a daunting task, but it gets easier when you follow some golden rules. Here’s what you should keep in mind.
Align marketing goals with business objectives
It may sound obvious, however to your surprise, most marketers get distracted from business objectives while setting marketing goals.
Marketing opens up the world of endless and exciting opportunities. There are in-person promotional ideas, social media activities, industry exhibitions, and much more. You can get so focused on what you might do that your focus diverts from the already set business objectives.
You may need to create metrics for the following business goals:
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Sales of a particular product
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The increased retention rate of existing customers
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Offer to convert leads to customers
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Revenue from existing customers
Therefore, at every stage of setting your marketing goals, think if it supports what your business expects to achieve.
Set quarterly benchmarks
No one can achieve the goals in just a day - it requires time and patience.
Experts suggest that you will see more noticeable results in the fourth month than in the first. Set benchmarks for every quarter so that you can make sure everything is going on the right track.
When you achieve your first-quarter goals, you feel confident and can work with more enthusiasm for the next quarter.
Pro tip: Set a higher benchmark for the fourth quarter than the first quarter!
Set SMART marketing goals
With SMART goals, we mean Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic, and Time-bound goals.
Specific: Set a goal for a clearly defined metric.
Measurable: You must quantify your goal for the metric you want to improve.
Attainable: Bite off only the portion that you can chew. Set goals based on your analytics, not on industry benchmarks.
Relevant: Set a goal relevant to your company’s overall goal and related to industry trends.
Time-bound: Your goal must have a deadline to accomplish them.
Find out ‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘what’ behind your marketing goals and set realistic goals that blend with your customer’s needs.
Once you set goals, commit to them and plan your actions to achieve them.
Also, feel free to schedule a call with the marketing experts of Iron Marketers and design your marketing roadmap!