Setting marketing goals is essential to ensuring your efforts are contributing to your company’s bottom line and determining where it’s worth spending your time and resources.
While it’s difficult to be 100% sure you’ll reach your marketing goals, by planning, analyzing and thinking through whole strategies in advance, you increase your chances of success. Here are seven tips to help you hit your goals.
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Make Your Goal Clear, Visible and Measurable
Do you know the biggest problem many people and companies face when trying to accomplish their goals? They don’t know what exactly they want to achieve.
And, even if they do know, their wording is vague and imprecise. Therefore, the first secret to achieving marketing goals is ridiculously simple: you must have a concrete goal.
According to one study, marketers who set goals are 376%more likely to report success.
How to set concrete goals
You can set clear, visible and measurable goals using the SMART framework. According to it, your marketing goals should be:
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Specific: The wording of your goal should contain definitive targets. For example, getting more traffic isn’t a specific goal, but getting 50 unique visitors per day is.
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Measurable: This means that your results should be clearly bound to some mathematical indicators and should not be abstract. For example, increasing users’ loyalty is an abstract goal, but getting 1000+ Instagram subscribers in a month is a measurable one.
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Attainable: In other words, it should be realistically achievable.
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Relevant: Your goal should satisfy the needs of your business at the current moment.
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Timely: Your goal should have a specific timeline in which you want it achieved.
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Even in B2B, You Are Marketing to Humans
B2B marketing is specifically between two companies. But, who represents these companies? That’s right, every transaction between businesses involves the direct interactions of people.
Therefore, you can’t forget that the target of your marketing is a person. In order to solve problems for the business, you need to solve problems for the people who work there, as well as their customers.
Human communication, understanding and relationships have always worked in marketing, and they will continue to be effective.
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Stories Are More Powerful Than You May Think
Storytelling has become quite a popular trend, and, in fact, it is a very powerful tool for achieving marketing goals. Only 5% of people will remember a fact or figure, but 65% will remember a story that was told to them.
Make stories a part of your brand’s content development strategy, and your customers will listen to you enthusiastically. Moreover, if your story resonates with their challenges, you can build relationships that will last for years.
How to come up with a story
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Determine what you’re trying to achieve with your story. It should be a part of your SMART goal.
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Understand who your audience is and why they benefit from your product.
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Keep your story simple. Start with a problem, offer a solution and end with a success.
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Find the right format and the right platform for your story. You don’t have to just create written content; Videos are also perfect for storytelling.
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Make a story that inspires viewers to become customers. They should not just buy your product; they should buy the idea your product and company represent.
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Measure the results and try to find out what part of the story engaged your audience the most.
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Start With an Audience — Not With a Deadline
A common marketing pitfall is creating content for the sake of it as opposed to thinking about what you want the content to achieve. It’s easy to adapt some popular material from Google’s top searches, add some stock images and pat yourself on the back for a job well done because “According to our content marketing strategy, we need material X by date Y to publish it on platform Z.”
Technically, the task has been completed. However, will it generate the desired results?
Probably not. Because it’s necessary to ground your efforts in the needs of your target audience, not a deadline. What are your audience’s pain points right now and how can you help? The secret is to analyze the changing demands of users and give them valuable content in return.
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Screen out Poor-Fit Customers
There are many companies that feel they can’t afford to not sell to everyone who’s willing to buy their product or service. However, marketing and selling to poor-fit customers will have a negative impact on your ability to reach your marketing goals.
Clients with whom you don’t want to work, who cannot be satisfied and who constantly demand more for less shouldn’t be your priority. They are not economically viable. They’ll eat up your time and resources, and they won’t result in ROI. Plus, you won’t be able to feature these poor-fit customers in content like case studies and testimonials that help you acquire new business.
Thus, if your marketing goal is to attract new customers, you need to learn to cut off ones who won’t be a good fit.
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Delegate and Outsource Your Marketing Tasks Efficiently
34% of small businesses outsource their digital marketing responsibilities.
Outsourcing makes it possible for you to concentrate on the ways you can best grow your business while delegating other tasks to professionals who specialize in those areas. Here are the proofs it is effective for any business.
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59% of companies outsource to cut their expenses, and 57% do it to be able to concentrate on their core activities.
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18% of businesses say that they outsource tasks to get help from a high-skilled professional they don’t have on staff.
Therefore, the secret to achieving a marketing goal may be to find someone who will take the responsibility off your plate. For example, you might be able to create a form strategy, (by the way, 89% of companies say they will never outsource strategic planning tasks) but the development of a logo and color palette might be better entrusted to design professionals.
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Find a Tool That Matches Your Goal and Use It
It probably doesn’t make sense to talk for a long time about how technology has changed business, because the secret of this section is very simple: once you’ve identified your goal, choose a tool that will help you accomplish it.
For instance, if you want to increase your website’s search ranking, use an SEO tool like Moz, SEMRush or Ahrefs. If you want to generate more leads, use a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Pardot or Marketo. And, if you want to create more engaging content, you can use a video platform like Vidyard or Wistia or an interactive content tool like Ceros.
Conclusion
While achieving your marketing goals may not be the easiest thing to accomplish, the basic ways to do so are simple: determine what you want to accomplish, combine expertise with helpful technology and, above all else, always proceed from the needs of your customers.
