Ever wonder why even some best marketing ideas fail?
It mostly happens when the company uses the idea as a one-shot attempt at marketing instead of having a defined marketing goal.
Marketing objectives are necessary for any business. Without marketing objectives, your team will be lost on the best way to approach and implement strategies and there can be immense discoordination which would derail even the best of plans.
So, how can you draw out the marketing objectives, and what’s the best way to plan them out?
Let’s find out the answers from our Austin digital marketing experts now.
What Can Be Your Marketing Objectives?
We can’t tell you exactly what your marketing goals should be. It differs from company to company based on your industry, services, and business goals. And similarly, the metrics you’re tracking for these goals are also very different. It can increase your website traffic, email sign-ups, ad clicks, product sales, or anything you want it to be.
Let’s take the HubSpot survey as an example. For the question, ‘How do you measure the success of your content marketing strategy?’ we can see varied responses from marketers talking about the measurables.
Similarly, a company’s marketing goals are wildly different, with numerous metrics used to keep track of them. We can’t tell you exactly how your goals should be. But, we can give you a peek into what they can be.
Our specialists from YellowFin Digital, one of the in-demand Austin marketing agencies for startups and SMBs, show a sample of the different elements that can be a part of your marketing objectives.
Improve Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is all about making your audience base familiar with your brand name. This need not include only your target audience but encompasses those related to your industry.
Typically, your motive here is to get your brand name out there as much as possible so that the next time people think of a company that offers your product, your name should be the first one that comes to their mind.
You can measure the level of brand awareness through sample market research to gauge the effectiveness of your influence in the industry.
Enhance Lead Generation
By lead generation, we don’t just mean to increase the number of leads but also the quality of the lead. When you’re able to reach out to warm leads with high chances of converting, your ROI improves.
You can easily monitor and measure your lead gen system in your CRM by looking at the cost per lead, user behavior analytics, conversion rates, etc.
Boost Customer Conversions
This is one of the top marketing objectives for all companies. When you want to increase the number of customer conversions, you need to measure it against the cost per customer, the number of inbound leads, sales costs, and the profits.
Sometimes, customer conversions aren’t just tied to the revenue but also expand your current offerings. This would mean a combination of current customers plus new customers and this objective would have two main sub-goals, to approach and convert each of them.
Increase Customer Retention
For companies providing subscription services and products that require repetitive purchases, customer retention would bring in a good amount of continuous revenue without too much effort. Why? Because the customers are already familiar with you and your brand and therefore, would be ready to repurchase the same thing in a heartbeat, of course, with a bit of persuasion from your side.
Our experts at our Austin SEO company use a term called the customer lifetime value, which is calculated by a combination of average customer lifespan, order value, and purchase frequency.
Step-by-Step Approach to Create Marketing Goals
Now that you understand how goals should be let’s take you through a step-by-step process of defining your marketing goals.
Step 1: Be Clear on Your Long-Term Vision
If there’s one sole objective of your company, what would it be? This becomes a long-term vision. When you’re clear on what you want to be 10 or 15 years down the line, you’ll get immense clarity to decide what you want to do now.
Step 2: Identify Your Challenges
When you have a clear vision, you can now look at the challenges you need to overcome to reach it. List out your current limitations in running your business, the biggest hurdles, and break them down into small action elements.
Step 3: Set SMART Goals
With these details from the previous steps, now you can go on to create your marketing goals.
For any Austin internet marketing strategy, we use a popular marketing term called SMART to have a clear objective of what we need.
Specific: Defined goals that answer when, how much, what….
Measurable: The KPIs needed to track the specific goals
Achievable: Realistic goals that are attainable for you and your team
Relevant: Aligning the goals with the bigger goals of your business
Timely: Timeline for achieving the goals
Step 4: Create a Detailed Strategy
Once you have defined your SMART goals, you now have some hard facts to develop strategies. When you have multiple marketing goals, create a targeted strategy around it, focusing on attaining each goal. Try as much as possible to not clump multiple strategies initially as it could mess up and dilute your process.
See if you can get the help of external agencies to achieve any particular goal. If you’re looking for someone to help with Austin SEO services, you can request a free quote from us.
Final Thoughts
Every marketing goal is unique and every strategy to attain it is different. You should assess your business and your target market to create a strategy around your marketing objectives that works for you.