Now, it’s important to remember that business and marketing goals will differ for every business. Take the time to ask yourself what your marketing activity is trying to achieve. How will your marketing strategy contribute to your long-term business goals?
What Are Marketing Goals?
You may wonder how marketing goals differ from business goals. According to HubSpot, marketing goals are specific and measurable goals that help you meet your overall business goals. These goals will vary depending on your business’s particular needs. They can range from generating quality leads and increasing brand awareness to improving customer ratings.
Regardless of your marketing goals, they need to align with your long-term business objectives. Goals should provide you with clarity, purpose, and direction. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and money.
Let’s explain how to align your marketing and long-term business goals.
5 Steps to Align Marketing Goals with Business Goals
Step 1: Create Your Business Goals
Knowing your business goals helps guide you through developing your marketing strategy. Your larger business plan and vision statement offer a big-picture view. While combining short-term and long-term goals will make up specific strategies to meet your big business goals.
Short-term Business Goal Example:
Increase sales by X% over the next three months.
Long-term Business Goal Example:
Launch three new products over the next two years.
Using smart data analysis, you can predict customer behavior, reduce churn, and identify opportunities for growth and improvement. It’s essential to look at previous goals and adjust where needed. Without specific data points, you can only think in general terms.
For example: at the start of your PPC campaign, your monthly income was about $15,000. After your campaign, your monthly income is around $20,000. So, was your campaign a success?
Possibly. There may have been sales growth across your industry. Your product may have been trending for other reasons. Or did you have other ads running at the same time?
Look at industry trends, related marketing initiatives, and your customer’s journey to understand what is and isn’t working in your campaigns. Having this information is vital for future marketing campaigns and goals.
Business goals will vary depending on your brand situation, industry specifics, and external economic climate. Regardless of your circumstances, revenue, increasing customers, and ranking higher in customer preference will determine business success.
Step 2: Audit Your Current Marketing Efforts
A marketing audit is necessary to align your marketing and business goals. Review your current marketing strategies with the goals of the business.
You’ll need to gather and analyze data from previous campaigns and goals. A standard tool used across industries is Google Analytics. Add Google Analytics to your website, and you can quickly start tracking the behaviors of your site visitors. Another great data source is social media analytics.
These analytics tools allow you to learn almost anything about your customers, from what products they’re buying to their age. And you can break this information down to the individual level and develop well-defined buyer personas.
Now, all that data you’ve been collecting will come into use. Because the right data allows you to identify what is and isn’t working and where to shift your focus. Ultimately data provides the power to make meaningful decisions for long-term business success.
Every marketing audit will differ depending on your business’s specific KPIs and changing needs. However, certain metrics are universally applicable, including:
- Branding: Use a style guide for clear, concise messaging across marketing channels
- Website Activities: Monitor total traffic, bounce rate, time on page, and landing page conversions.
- Social Media: Important social media metrics to monitor include reach, impressions, engagement rate, and audience growth rate, to name a few.
- SEO: Implement SEO best practices to appear higher in search engine results pages.
- Insightful Competitor Analysis: to compete in oversaturated digital marketing, you need to understand what your competitors are doing and what is being said about them.
The above is just a sample list of metrics you can audit. Consider broader areas such as process efficiencies, customer experience, and content quality. In addition, consider hiring a local digital marketing agency to provide data metrics expertise.
Step 3: Set Realistic Marketing Goals
While following a generic marketing strategy checklist is easy, you want to ensure your marketing goals align with your overall business objectives. To do this, you want to have realistic expectations and direct your marketing budget and staffing accordingly.
As we stated earlier, all businesses have long-term goals and short-term goals.
Your long-term goals will require you to invest more time and money but should provide a greater return on your investment. These goals typically range from 12 to 18 months and include broader brand recognition, visibility, and exposure insights.
On the other hand, short-term goals are typically attainable within one quarter. A short-term goal is easily measurable and provides a quick win for the team. These wins are great for generating revenue and keeping up team morale as you work towards your long-term marketing objectives.
Keep two key factors in mind when setting marketing strategy expectations:
- Ensure you are marketing to the right people (target audience) at the right time.
- Every marketing goal you set needs to follow the SMART Goal Framework.
SMART goals cover every aspect of the goal-setting process, from measurable goals to the reality of attaining a goal. Let’s break it down letter by letter:
Specific: Clearly state the objective of your goal so everyone understands what needs to be done and who will do it. Get as detailed as possible. Identify specific metrics to improve, team members, and action plans.
Measurable: A quantifiable measurement lets you know if you are progressing and helps keep you on track. Always set realistic, measurable goals like increasing site visitors by XX% over one month.
Attainable: Setting achievable goals for your marketing strategy ensures realistic outcomes and helps set you up for success.
Relevant: Marketing and overall business goals should make sense for your brand and address the overall vision of your business. Consider changing algorithms, trends, and your initial marketing plan when setting your goals.
Time-bound: Every objective, including your marketing goals, should have a set timeline. To measure and see results accurately, you need to establish a deadline for every goal.
Step 4: Measure Your Impact
Increasing traffic, driving more sales, gaining more site visitors, and establishing industry authority–are all critical factors in measuring marketing success. Businesses must understand their customers to provide the best experience while increasing revenue.
Regarding marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that the results you see may not match expectations. We are dealing with human behavior, which cannot be predicted. What you can discover while executing your marketing plan is to engage with new, broader audiences. Also, where customers interact with your brand (social media, email campaigns, and website pages) and if the market is not yet ready for a particular product or service.
Keep an open mind, and your marketing plan can lead you into your brand’s next growth phase.
Step 5: Analyze Data & Adapt
Once you’ve executed your marketing plan, it’s time to analyze your data and adapt your marketing goals.
What isn’t working and needs to stop? What needs to change? Where can you continue as planned?
It may seem like another audit, and in a way, it is. Analyzing and adapting your marketing efforts is a continual process to ensure your marketing goals align with your business goals.
In Conclusion
Marketing goals should always align with your long-term business goals. While metrics look good on paper, they only hold power if they help you achieve your objectives.
Leadership will measure success in revenue growth, market share, customer satisfaction, and shareholder value. Marketing professionals need to be able to adjust their approach to meet overall business objectives. This may include creating new KPIs and leveraging new channels. Or hiring a digital marketing agency to ensure the right people are working on the right projects.
While working with an agency, you’ll have a partner to help you align your marketing strategies and business goals. At New Path, we work with you and your team to take you to the next level. Every move we make will bring you closer to achieving your marketing and business goals.
Blog Last Updated on 3 months by New Path Digital
