One of the most common problems I’ve run into with clients over the past 30 years has been a lack of clear goals. If you don’t have clear goals, it’s much more difficult to build an effective marketing strategy, whether you’re doing an analog campaign with mailers or running Google Ads campaign. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s hard to figure out how to get there. Setting clear goals is vital for marketing success.
Benefits of Clear Goals:
- Clear goals provide direction and focus. They guide you in the right direction and prevent you from getting lost by way of distractions.
- Clear goals ensure marketing efforts support overall company goals
- Clear goals create benchmarks that can be used to track progress. If you know exactly what you want to do, you’ll be able to figure out the exact metrics to track to figure out whether you’re doing it.
- Clear goals keep teams aligned – everyone knows what the goal is and what they should be doing so it is reached.
Before you start any marketing campaign, set clear goals. The goal should be specific and measurable, not a generic statement. Instead of “I want to increase leads” you should set a goal of “I want to increase leads by 40% over the next 3 months by running targeted Google Ads”. With a goal like that, you have a set timeframe, a specific percentage of lead increase and a method for accomplishing it. Now that you have this goal, you can easily figure out how to track progress and measure success.
Keep Goals Simple
The simpler the goal, the easier it is to determine success or failure. With the goal example above, if I don’t increase leads by 40% in 3 months running Google Ads, I know I didn’t reach my goal. If I increase leads by 41% then I know I did reach my goal. If a goal is too complex it becomes more difficult to track and determine performance. I’ve worked with client who seemed to have an addition to making things complicated. Don’t make things complicated!
When your team understands the goal, it’s easier for them to do what needs to be done to reach it. Set clear goals and keep them as simple as possible. Make sure goals can be tracked using reliable metrics and, if you see things going the wrong direction during a campaign in the tracked metrics, you can make adjustments. Setting clear goals is vital for marketing success.