Goals Are the Building Blocks of Your Marketing Plan

If you don't know where you're going, how do you know when you get there? This same question can be asked about your marketing. How do you know if your marketing is effective if you don't know what you want to accomplish?

Your marketing goals are simply a statement of the results you want to achieve. What's the primary reason you are marketing? Marketing goals should support your overall business goals. Just like any goal, marketing goals should be measurable. Goals must be specific and realistic as well.

Goals Contribute to Your Business Success

The first component of the plan is envisioning the goals--having a clear vision of what will be accomplished by the company during the current year and each subsequent year with great attention to detail. For example, your mission could be to provide service that makes customers feel like family. This is the underlying goal guiding all of your business and marketing activity. When there's a question about the relevance of a particular activity, it's always associated back to the overall goal of making people feel like family. Remembering this will help you stay focused and stay true to the values of the company.

In creating your marketing plan, you force yourself to focus on the specific goals you want to achieve for growth. The marketing plan also states actions to achieve those goals, like direct mail or social media.

A marketing goal can be a big number, such as a certain year-end revenue figure. It could also be a smaller number over a shorter period of time, such as five new clients per month. Goals, although specific and measurable, can also be a simple statement of a company's culture or attitude: to guarantee every customer is happy with the product or service, like QuantumDigital's WOW Guarantee.

Marketing goals can also align with your company's financial objectives, stated in marketing terms such as to increase:

• Sales (in dollars)
• Units sold
• Percent market share
• ROI on advertising spend
• Awareness
• Number of new accounts/relationships

Remember, don't burden yourself with too many goals. The right number of goals is the one that offers you a reasonably high probability of success.

Stretching yourself will produce the best results. Easy goals require no stretch. But setting goals that are unreasonably high will cause you to become frustrated, discouraged and defeated. Do you believe in your goals? You’re more likely to lose motivation if you didn’t believe it was achievable from the start.

Your marketing goals should be recorded. This allows for tracking, evaluating, measuring and managing. There's nothing better than crossing out an item on a to-do list. Overtime, you’ll see the completion of simpler goals build a foundation for loftier, more challenging goals in the future.

So, how do you prioritize these goals?

When people think of prioritization, they usually think, "What's most important?" While this is a good approach, you’re likely to run into times where two goals are of equal importance.

Just because you do one before the other doesn't always mean it's more important. Prioritization relates to focus. Which goal will you work on next? Which goal will you invest financially in first? Focus on completion as well as importance.

This doesn't imply that you should work on goals one at a time. In today's fast-paced environment, multitasking is almost a must. Managing multiple goals and activities simultaneously can be done, directing focus and resources as situations change and progress.