Your business has goals it wants to achieve – and whether you succeed relies on finding strategies that align with and empower these goals. Marketing tactics help connect with the customers and clients necessary to do so, and which ones you choose significantly impact that success. It ensures all marketing efforts directly contribute to the overall business objectives, establishing a clear, unified direction for your team.
In this post, we’ll review what makes qualitative marketing goals, diving into how to coordinate and implement goals that empower your business’s continued success.
What Makes a Quality Marketing Goal
A quality marketing goal provides direction to guide your business toward your goal and success – but not all goals are created equal. Quality goals coordinate with your business objectives and have a structured framework to achieve them. A well-defined goal could be to attract 100 new customers within the next three months through an optimized email marketing campaign. Achieving that goal requires calculating the number of emails you must send to prospects to accomplish that goal, which you can base on your email open rate.
Let’s look at how many emails you’d need to send to achieve those 100 new customers. The total volume depends on your email open and conversion rates. Email open determines the number of interactions with your emails, and conversion determines how many customers you get through those interactions.
For instance, if you send out 10,000 emails with a 20% email open rate, you’ll have 2,000 interactions. From that 2,000, a 5% conversion rate nets a total of 100 new customers. So, to achieve your goal, you’d need to email 10,000 new prospects.
This goal is specific, measurable, and has a set timeline, making it a quality marketing goal that can drive your tactics and empower your company's overarching aims.
Aligning Marketing Goals and Business Goals
By developing marketing strategies to serve the broader business objectives, companies can ensure every dollar spent on marketing directly impacts business growth. It fosters mutual understanding among different departments, leading to more efficient and effective collaboration amongst your team.
Identify Business Objectives
Business objectives vary from boosting sales, expanding your customer base, expanding your online presence, or enhancing brand awareness, but the objectives you choose shape the strategic direction of your marketing efforts. For instance, a business objective to expand your customer base might give rise to a marketing goal of reaching a specific number of potential customers through social media campaigns. You can have singular or multiple objectives, and the objectives should match them accordingly. Once you have these in mind, you can work backward to determine how you want to reach them. Positioning these objectives as the central point adds a structural element to your marketing plans, increasing their success by keeping you on track.
Your objectives and marketing goals work together in various, sometimes unseen ways, making it critical to measure overall impact through various means. Launching a brand awareness campaign may heighten the impact of your other marketing efforts, indirectly bringing in new sales and customers. While contributing to your goal, you must measure it through overall effectiveness. As your sales increase and campaigns improve, you can infer how well it works.
Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your customer's needs and preferences aids the implementation of effective marketing goals by giving you a path to reach the necessary people. By delving into your customer's habits, preferences, and pain points, you can tailor your marketing strategies to address their specific needs, creating a connection that ultimately drives customer action. Knowing where they browse and what they want to see can give you ideas for how to shape your creative messaging.
Analyze Your Past Marketing Performance
Evaluating the success of your previous marketing strategies helps to hone your knowledge about your customers, showing you what parts of your strategies worked and what didn’t. You can gain this information by auditing multiple components, including competitor analysis, web traffic, social media engagement, and search engine optimization. This information shows you how to adjust your strategies accordingly and lets you determine if any items could benefit you in your marketing or sales enablement.
Set SMART Goals
Once you know what you’d like to achieve, you must break them down to increase the chances of successful follow-through. Using SMART goals – which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound – you can lay out the parameters to achieve your goals. Instead of setting vague goals like "increase your social media presence," a SMART goal would be "gain 200 new Instagram followers within the next three months." From there, you can break down your goal by running a lead generation campaign encouraging social media sign-ups by sharing content or launching quizzes that will prompt people to subscribe.
Regularly Review and Modify
Just as you analyzed previous marketing goals to know the path to follow, you must set marketing goals that you can regularly review and modify. Marketing goals need the flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions, customer behavior, and business objectives. Regular reviews allow for course correction adjustments and ensure your marketing goals remain relevant and effective.
Achieve Company Goals with the Proper Marketing Tactics
McClatchy has the expertise to guide you in creating the perfect marketing goals for your company. As the second largest media company in the US, they can help you grow your business with a robust marketing strategy. Beyond their expertise, they have also built a massive media network and an audience they have accrued over decades, with multiple courses to reach them, allowing you to launch broad, multi-channel campaigns to grow your business.
Reach out today to learn more about how McClatchy can help you grow your business!
