How do you align your marketing goals with your business strategy?

This is where many businesses fail. Too often, companies set marketing goals without having their business objectives clearly defined. This puts the cart before the horse and leads to wasted time and budget. Effective marketing starts with your business goals. Where does leadership want to take the company in the next 1-3 years? What target revenue, growth, and market share is desired? Marketing goals should ladder up to support the overarching vision. With business objectives defined, then you can brainstorm how marketing can help achieve them. Want to increase revenue 15%? Marketing can boost leads and conversions. Need expanded market share? Build awareness and loyalty through branding.

When defining your marketing goals, it's important to align those goals and their impact to your business objectives. For example, if you want to increase your website traffic by 20%, what impact will that have on leads for your business or sign ups for your newsletter? And how much revenue will be added to your pipeline if leads are captured or how many newsletter opens/engagements will be generated with the new sign ups you've acquired. Thinking beyond one marketing campaign or initiative will ensure you're setting proper goals and will help you gain buy-in from relevant stakeholders.

The right marketing strategy starts with a clear understanding of the business goals. Is it to increase revenue, expand market share, launch a new product or improve customer retention. From there, you'll want to hone in on your target personas and deep dive on the competitive landscape. Next, what are your available resources including budget, tools/tech stack and skillsets on the team to ensure effective planning and execution. Once you understand resourcing, evaluate marketing channels that overlap with your target personas and business goals you're looking to achieve. By choosing the right strategy and taking an integrated marketing approach you're set up to maximize results for the business.

Before we even get to marketing strategies and implementing tactics, its important to have market research, segmentation and targeting locked down. Finding out where your target market plays is paramount in executing correctly with an appropriate budget, and not waste playing in a space where your market isn't.

Marketing tactics also need to be measurable and aligned with the overall goals. The tactics used depend on the size and budget of the business and the results expected. It's important to monitor, measure, test, and adjust tactics based on results. Many businesses wait too long to realize they need to either change what they are doing or make adjustments. The market moves fast and you need to be agile and responsive.

There are essentially 2 buckets that marketing tactics can be placed or: 1. Direct response (bottom of funnel) 2. Brand building (mid/upper funnel) Both are important and actually work together when used properly. Few businesses get the integration right and end up struggling in this “try this” “try that” nonstop cycle of inconsistent marketing because they haven’t build a plan & committed to it that includes both.