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BUSINESS NEWS - When it comes to your marketing efforts, defining your marketing goals is of utmost importance in order to achieve a good return on investment (ROI) for your efforts. 

Without clearly defined goals, marketers will fall at risk of blindly producing marketing campaigns and content that doesn’t resonate with their intended audience or produce the required results.

Defining your marketing goals

Defining your marketing goals should be one of the first steps when creating a marketing plan. 

The goals you set out for yourself may change over time, depending on internal and external factors, so it’s important to note that your goals will need to be agile to ensure the desired results are met.

It’s even more critical now in the digital age and as an essential part of a successful digital marketing campaign for businesses to respond and communicate to their customers with clarity and ease. 

This can only be done with clearly defined goals in order to maintain a cohesive brand message and to position yourself to be successful in this age of digital transformation.

Creating clearly defined digital marketing goals helps to create a solid foundation to succeed and ensures a focused team that is ready to deliver result-driven marketing campaigns that achieve their goals.

Understand your business goals

In order to create marketing goals, you will first need to understand the business goals. This is necessary in order to tie in your marketing goals and achieve the desired results.

The starting point for any marketing strategy is somewhat centred around the overarching business goals as they give purpose and direction to what exactly it is you want to achieve. 

This lays the foundations required to reach that goal and defines the steps needed to achieve that goal.

Align your digital marketing goals to business goals

Your marketing goals and business goals go hand-in-hand, so it’s critical that you align your goals at the very beginning to ensure a successful outcome. 

This will not only ensure that your marketing campaigns produce successful results that directly impact the business’ ROI, but it also means that your marketing goals will be aligned with the business goals so that all the areas of your business, including production and sales, are working together towards the same outcomes.

When defining the marketing goals, marketers need to keep in mind the overarching business goals at each stage. Failing to take these into consideration and purely focusing on marketing metrics will put you at risk of failing to deliver what the business wants and therefore be a waste of your time and energy.

Businesses that underestimate this step of aligning their marketing goals with the business goals are at risk of working towards goals that may not, in fact, be beneficial towards the business or even working towards goals that could be unrealistic, which will result in failure.

Keep your marketing goals focused

When creating your marketing goals for your business or next campaign, it’s essential to prioritise them in order to keep focused on the areas that require the most attention. Below are some factors that will help guide you when setting up your marketing goals.

Don’t overextend yourself by setting too many goals at once. This could spread your teams too thin, and you could be at risk of not achieving any of the goals set out.

Keep your goals focused. There will always be a variety of things you could do but this doesn’t mean you should do them. This applies to which platforms you choose to utilise, what strategies you decide to use, and the audience you intend to reach.

Defined and focused goals will help to ensure your team members are clear on their priorities which will result in a cohesive marketing strategy.

Set SMART goals

A great way to keep your goals focused is to use the SMART way of setting objectives. This will help you to set realistic, quantifiable, and focused goals that your team can set their sights on achieving. 

Having everyone working towards the same relevant and quantifiable goal will ensure that your marketing efforts are a success and provide the required ROI. So, what does SMART stand for and what does it entail to set these SMART objectives?

Specific

Your digital marketing goals should be well-defined and specific. Rather than setting a goal to “increase website traffic”, the SMART way of setting goals would require you to be more specific so that you may have quantifiable goals. Instead of a broad goal, an example of a SMART goal would be to “increase web traffic from Europe”.

Measurable

In order for your goals to be quantifiable, you’ll need to be able to measure their success. Building on the previous goal example, you would work towards a goal such as “increase web traffic from Europe by 15%” instead of just saying to “increase web traffic in Europe”. 

This gives you means by which you can measure the success of your goal and gives your teams something to aim for.

Achievable

When setting goals, it’s great to aim high, but you need to ensure that your goals are achievable and not unrealistic. It’s important to ask yourself what can actually be achieved and which goals would just be setting yourself and your teams up for failure.

Relevant

As previously stated, your marketing goals should relate and align with your overarching business goals to ensure a successful outcome. For example, you may think you need to grow your social media following, but you need to take into consideration if that will actually help you meet your goal of, for example, increasing your sales. 

Marketers will need to consider how the marketing goals help achieve the business goals so that they may set relevant goals that will help them achieve both their marketing and business goals.

Time-bound

Giving your goals deadlines is critical to ensure that your marketing campaigns go live at the right time, and it also ensures consistent progress in the long run. This is due to the fact that by setting goal milestones, you’ll be able to use this information to benchmark these results against past and future campaigns in order to more effectively reach your goals.

Having time-bound goals also gives more weight to them as you’ll be able to focus your marketing efforts on achieving these well-laid-out goals. 

An example of a time-bound goal is “increase web traffic in Europe by 15% in Q1”, which you can see is already a much better-defined goal than the first example.

Final words

As you can see, setting well-defined marketing goals is critical for the success of both marketing campaigns and the business itself. Without clear and measurable goals, marketers will be at risk of producing content and campaigns that do not deliver the desired ROI. 

Learn how to set up your own marketing goals by signing up for a digital marketing online short course to give you the tools you need in order to produce successful marketing campaigns that deliver results, again and again.

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