No marketing goals? Might as well pack it in now.
Jill Leckie
Full stack marketing consultant | ?? Helping small teams and businesses manage their online presence and big brand ambitions | ? lead with curiosity ??
I have to be honest here and say that it still surprises me how few small businesses have marketing *goals*. Most of them have marketing plans and ‘tactics as strategies’. But few of them have goals.
“What’s the bloody difference!” I hear you scream.
Goals and marketing activity goals
It’s going back to that question - what do you want to achieve? Like sales goals or health goals... what do you want to achieve via marketing activity? Here are some examples of marketing related goals:
Starting out with a goal of ‘selling out all of my stock’, or ‘getting more visitors to my website’ won’t cut it. They need to be specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable and time-specfic. YUP ... SMART. There has to be a measurable outcome and a solid purpose to the goal.
Your marketing activity should be developed around achieving these goals.
It sounds obvious right? For so many reasons. They give purpose, measurable outcomes, and the scope to contextualise activity.
In my previous article we discussed how tactics can sometimes be confused with strategy.
Marketing goals in strategy - a short case study
The best way to explain this is by sharing an example. Recently, I switched a client’s marketing goals and strategy from using social media to drive traffic and capture new audiences to relying on email marketing. Sounds scary? But, there was some decent purpose and strategy behind the switch.
By carefully monitoring traffic acquisition and engagement we could see that social media just wasn’t driving traffic onto the website. Our social media accounts were growing but they weren’t converting to actionable events or purchase conversions on the website.
The marketing stream that was consistently driving traffic and conversions was digital newsletters. Not only driving new traffic but existing / return users. It was obvious that we had to focus the resources and time on building the marketing stream that was working.
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So, we drilled down into the customer flow and built a series of automations triggered by specific customer actions i.e. showing interest in particular products, signing up at particular parts of the user journey. Each email automation flow triggered different email flows with specific content relating to the point at which that customer is in our ‘user funnel / sales funnel’.
Our goal - increase the number of sign ups to our digital newsletters by 20% in the next 6 weeks - our marketing goal - how we will go about achieving this goal and incorporating it into our overall strategic plan (i.e. content development, relevant partnership developments and peripheral marketing activities we need to activate).
What happens without marketing goals?
You will waste energy and time on producing content that doesn’t generate the outcomes you were expecting. You will focus on the wrong marketing streams and eventually spend money in the wrong areas. It will feel like you are pushing treacle up a hill with nothing to show for it at the end.
Resources to check out:
If you have any questions about anything you’ve read in this article, reach out and DM me. If you need help wading through the digital marketing woods - get in touch!
/Jill
Great advice. I need to re read and implement myself!