So you’ve set out to build a new business. Now you have your suppliers, vendors, and a handful of supporters and launched your brand.
That is only the easier part. Yes, even importing directly from Chinese wholesale suppliers for your product catalog is considered not as difficult. The most challenging part is yet to come: continuously growing your business.
If you’re gunning for success, you need to have clear goals and objectives. You don’t want to keep doing something that doesn’t translate to growth.
But first, let us understand the difference between a goal and an objective. A goal is a broad or general vision of what you want to achieve. Meanwhile, an objective is a particular blueprint of how you will reach that vision. Therefore, you need to set specific marketing goals to guide your actions.
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SMART Goals
When listing goals, you have to think SMART. This is a goals framework that organizations usually utilize in goal setting. You may have encountered this before, but it’s worth revisiting.
Being SMART means being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. These are all essential in listing your marketing goals.
- Specific – Choose what metric you want to do better, be it your brand awareness, the quality of leads, or the value you offer to customers.
- Measurable – Think about how you will measure your progress toward achieving that goal. Quantify it, so you have a clear target. For example, you want to increase your website visitors by 10 percent. This will later guide your marketing strategy.
- Attainable – Of course, you want to make sure your goal is attainable. Adjust or set this based on the numbers you got based on your analytics. Be realistic, lest you end up with goals that are impossible to reach.
- Relevant – Relevance is crucial in making goals. In this case, you can look at what is going on in your industry. If you are in retail and notice an uptick in shopping using voice assistants, you can have a goal based on it.
- Time-bound – Of course, there is a matter of time. How long is your team supposed to be batting for a particular goal? Set a timeline or a deadline. Do not forget to celebrate milestones along the way for additional motivation.
Examples of Marketing Goals
Now that you know how to set SMART goals, the next step is to look at the marketing goals you want to achieve. Many factors can affect growth, and they can vary from company to company. But there are goals shared by many businesses, regardless of their industry.
Like goals in general, digital marketing goals are guided by a framework too. These are the 5S:
- Sell – increasing sales and revenue
- Speak – engaging customers through various channels
- Serve – adding customer value
- Save – cutting down costs
- Sizzle – brand building online
Increase Brand Awareness
When you are new to the industry, you may only have a handful of people who know that your brand exists. You need to make your target audience aware of your company to change that.
This goal is best for people to follow your brand. They may not be ready to purchase anything from you at first. But the important thing is to ensure that you can reach them much more easily.
For example, you can flash ads at them and encourage them to follow your social media accounts and sign up for newsletters. By getting more followers, likes, and shares, you increase brand awareness.
This will help your audience become more familiar with your brand in the long run. And when they are ready to make another purchase, yours would be among the top considerations. After all, they would rather buy from a name they know and trust than from an unknown brand.
This goal is too broad, though. You can still make this more specific by choosing a particular channel where you want to boost awareness and setting the numbers you wish to reach.
Become an Authority
It’s not hard to see that there are niches nowadays that used to be specialized but are now saturated. You need to become an authority in your industry to truly stand out. This goes beyond just having people recognize your brand. It’s about them distinguishing you as one who is credible in various matters.
You cannot just churn out content for the likes to achieve this. What you put out must have value. This will make you more trustworthy, and people will be more likely to choose you because they know that you know your stuff and understand them.
Generate Quality Leads
When you have been in business for a while, you know that not all leads, well, lead to success. That is why generating quality is a common goal shared by many companies. Your sales team needs them to have consumers to nurture into actual paying customers.
If you find this challenging, you’re not alone. A HubSpot research has shown that 27% of marketers consider it their most challenging task in 2021. And 21% expect to face the same difficulty in 2022.
Fortunately, there are marketing methods that help you get higher-quality leads. There are time-tested strategies and clever ploys that marketers swear upon.
Whatever path you choose depends on your industry and what you know about your customers.
Boost Revenue
What business doesn’t want to boost its revenue? This is the bottom line of most companies. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can reach customers at different stages of the funnel.
You also need to think about what products or services to push to boost revenue. Not everyone may be enamored with a particular category of items. So you need to curate what to market to various customer segments. You can try A/B testing here to see what will work.
Develop Customer Value
Retaining customers is more complicated than getting new ones. Loyal consumers are what you want to sustain your brand.
Gaining customer loyalty entails offering them something they value. Your brand has to keep delighting them so that they are convinced to stay with you. And when they are genuinely pleased, they can spread the word about the business, hitting two birds with one stone.
How can digital marketing help in this regard? You can create a loyalty program where customers have exclusive access to new products and promos. Also, do not be shy in sharing customer stories! Authentic experiences from real customers can help attract more buyers to your doorstep.
Your marketing and CRM teams can work together in coming up with strategies as well. By doing so, the marketing team will have relevant insights to create the best approaches.
Track and Manage Goals
You need to track and manage your goals along the way. To do so effectively, you need the right tools. You can use project management software to aid you in keeping an eye on milestones and goals.
Solutions like that would have dashboards where you can see the progress of goals with one look. They also make it easy to delve deeper into specific areas if you want more details. Project management platforms also come with Gantt charts that allow you to set the timeline for goals. That way, you can truly visualize your plans and have the sense of urgency to achieve them.
Too busy to manage marketing on different fronts? You can count on Google Ads growth service. They can help optimize your campaigns and get more quality leads. You can rely on them for ongoing ads or auditing your account to see whether your current strategies are effective.
