Set Your Marketing Goals for the New Year!

The New Year is right around the corner, and many businesses are looking towards the future. Have you decided what your company will be focusing on in the new decade?

For impactful and sustainable growth and change in your business, it’s helpful to have a set of specific and achievable goals in mind. Marketers who set goals are 376% more successful than those who do not.

But setting goals is about much more than having a dream or vision. Read on to learn how to set achievable goals and how doing so can improve your business.

How To Set A Goal

Setting a goal for your business is about much more than trying to reach a finish line. The goals you set will act as a roadmap for your business to guide you in the right direction. Returning to and reviewing these goals can help you compare your progress to your overarching goal and help you adjust your plan to get you to the finish line.

SMART Goals

We suggest using the SMART goal method to ensure that your goals are going to benefit your company in the desired ways. SMART goals are…

Specific- should clearly communicate why the goal is important, who is involved, what is expected to happen, and how it will happen.
Measurable- specific criteria for tracking progress
Attainable- it must be realistic for your team to reach this goal
Relevant- goal must be relevant to your business and core values
Timely- set an expected end date to reach the goal

Choosing Your Goal

Every business is going to have individual goals that will impact the company in unique ways. The marketing goals a business chooses to focus on should be based on the needs and expectations of the brand. Depending on the age, size, industry, experience, and needs of the business, each company will need to assess their individual situation to identify goals that will most benefit the company.

Visits, Contacts, and Customers

According to Hubspot, most marketers set goals revolving around a business’ number of visits, contacts and customers for the year, quarter, month, etc. Hubspot believes that “focusing on one of these specific segments gives the clearest vision of success.”

Visits- good for new businesses or new websites, or for businesses with strong conversions looking for additional traffic
Contacts- for those with strong traffic but looking for better leads.
Customers- for brands with strong traffic and leads but not enough conversions.

To determine which category on which to narrow your focus, review your previous goals and results. Have you focused on any of these categories before? Is there a category you have been neglecting?

Reviewing the current state of your business, where you would like to be, and what efforts you have made in the past are all vital to forming a worthwhile and effective marketing plan.

Hubspot offers a Goals app on their Dashboard that will help you set, maintain, and achieve SMART goals. Simply fill out a template to create a dashboard that will help you track and achieve your goal.

Marketing Goal Examples

Under each category are many different individual goals. What you choose to focus on should be directly relevant to the needs of your business and should aim to help the company in a greater way; most marketing goals are connected to an overarching business goal.

More followers

Follower count can indicate brand awareness and online visibility. This marketing goal would work to further the greater business goal of increasing brand awareness and loyalty.

Your follower account is not the only relevant metric in this situation. If you track where your followers are, you can learn more about their behavior. Once you identify places on the internet where your audience frequents, you can better target that segment and increase traffic to your social pages. This awareness paired with quality social content should encourage more followers.

Increased social engagement

Unlike follower count, social engagement is a bit more complex. There is no single metric, like number of followers, that will tell you how engaged your audience is; instead, you must track a variety of metrics to properly assess your situation.

Engagement tells you how much of, and how frequently your audience is currently interacting with your account. The most basic metrics include likes, comments and shares. To find your engagement, simply take the number of interactions with a post divided by impressions/reach. The higher the rate, the more people clicking on your content when seeing it on their social feeds.

Mentions can also indicate good brand awareness; especially organic mentions, where users are tagging your brand without prompting or outside of a reply.

New media

If you’re looking to spice up your content and add new media, your previous content may be the most effective way to find what media your audience engages with.

If you’ve only ever posted one or two types of content (like blogs and images), then it may be a good time to experiment with new media. Before creating your own, research more of what your audience is currently watching. Your user demographics and behavior may reveal what type of content you are missing out on.

Much of this information may come from your own data; review your engagement across channels to see what type of media is most popular with your unique audience. This is especially effective if you share diverse media from other sources.

Once you have an idea of what works for your audience, you can begin experimenting. Try posting videos, gifs, infographics, or any other form of content to test out what your audience is attracted to. Over time, continue to track the success of your content to determine what media is most engaging so you can better allot your time to impactful content.

Increased conversions

A conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors who commit to an offer; this can be used for any conversion- signing up for a mailing list, buying a product, filling out a form, etc.- and is an important KPI for measuring messaging and engagement.

Increasing conversion rates may involve experimenting with sharing new media. You need to learn what converts your audience most effectively and find new ways to convert those you are currently failing to engage. CTAs and other links on landing pages can help to encourage the right response from a visitor. Review the success of past CTAs and experiment with new wording, design, and placement to find those visitors who you have failed to convert in the past.

The key to any marketing goal is tracking and analyzing. Setting a goal or creating a campaign is only the beginning. You must track your progress throughout the entirety of the project in order to properly assess your current state and make any needed adjustments. Once you have a goal and are confident in how to track its progress, you will be on your way to more effective and profitable marketing strategies.

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

Christine

Have You Set Your Marketing Goals for 2020?