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Marketing Tips | January
Your marketing plan will set out where you are now, where you want to be and by when. But write your goals down somewhere you can see them every day. To fulfil your marketing plan, you need to stay focused on achieving your goals.
A guide to setting marketing goals
Your marketing goals must align with your company business goals. So, if your business goal is to increase revenue by 15% in 2019, your marketing goals need to not only align with this but actively contribute to this. And while it sounds straightforward, it’s not always easy to get this right.
It’s not as simple as saying, ‘OK, I need to find an additional 15% revenue next year, I need to find more customers’. You need to use your knowledge of your customers, competitors and markets and define where this revenue will come from:
- Existing customers, existing markets?
- New customers, new markets?
- Existing products and services or do you need to develop new product and service offers?
You also need to ask yourself what the potential obstacles are to any of the above approaches. Once you’ve given this some thought, you can start to shape your marketing goals.
Make your goals SMART
A goal is meaningless unless it’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound. So, if you’re setting marketing goals for a visitor attraction, it’s not enough to say we will ‘increase revenue from visitors to our attraction’.
Let’s look at how to make your goals SMART:
Be Specific – What do you want to achieve? Which customers are you targeting? All customers, or specific customer groups? What are they spending now and by how much do you wish to increase this? How are you going to do this?
So, the broad goal of increasing revenue from existing visitors might become:
‘Convert 10% of all local visitors to buying an annual pass by the end of 2019. We will achieve this goal through a highly targeted and sustained marketing campaign to all families with children under 12 in a 35-mile radius of the venue. We expect to achieve 250 annual pass sales and generate revenue of £21,000.’
Measurable – Make sure you can measure your goal. For the previous example, you can easily measure this goal using sales data.
Achievable – Is it feasible? Have you done your research on customer propensity to buy? For the example goal, the assumption is that you know how many local visitors use your attraction and the 10% figure is achievable. You also need to consider if you have the marketing budget and resource to run the campaign necessary to achieve the goal.
Relevant – Is it appropriate to your business and your overall company goals? If it’s not, then you need to rethink.
Timebound – Think about when you’re going to achieve the goal. Consider when you will start to see the results and what remedial action you might take if you’re at risk of missing your target.
Don’t set too many goals
Unless you have the luxury of a massive marketing team (which most of us don’t), be realistic about the number of goals you set. Only create goals that will deliver the corporate purpose and don’t create so many that you can’t achieve them. And it’s OK to split a large goal into several smaller ones.
Keep your goals where you can see them!
Don’t make the mistake of crafting beautiful SMART marketing goals and leaving them to languish on your company’s server. Print them out, put them where you can see them, set up a Trello board – however you work, make sure they are visible, and you stay focused on achieving them.