How often do you review your marketing goals? If you are like many small business owners, that answer isn’t often enough – or at all. You should be monitoring your marketing efforts on a monthly, if not quarterly basis. While many business owners want to do this, they don’t know where to start.
We can help you set clear marketing goals that you can take action on.
Why Are Marketing Goals Important?
Simply put, goals tell you where your business currently is and where you want it to go.
Goals are measurable, tangible, and (should be) achievable. Think about goals from a weight loss perspective. Sure, you can say that you want to lose weight by eating healthier, but how can you know if you lose weight if you don’t know what you weigh now, or know what a healthy weight for your height is?
Every business wants to make more sales and grow their revenue through marketing; however, few set goals for growth and then create plans to achieve those goals.
Unfortunately, the marketing world is particularly susceptible to businesses operating without goals. For example, 78% of small businesses report using social media to promote their brands. This often makes other business owners feel like they need to use social media as well. As a result, they create a Facebook page, post on it occasionally, and expect it to grow. Other examples are brands trying to stay competitive in SEO and paid media buys without tracking the results that come from their efforts.
Digital marketing has made it easy to tie your marketing efforts back to customers. You just have to put in the effort.
We can help you set clear marketing goals to track your progress and promotional efforts over time.
How Can You Identify Marketing Goals Within Your Business?
Each business has different marketing goals that they rely on to see how healthy their promotional efforts are, and these goals all fall into the sales funnel.
The sales funnel starts at the top where people hear about your brand for the first time and works its way through your marketing efforts until these customers buy.
A sample sales funnel might look like this:
- Top-funnel: A customer hears about your brand for the first time, likes your social media content, and looks at your branding.
- Mid-funnel: A customer visits your website, checks your hours, and reads online reviews about your business.
- Bottom-funnel: A customer checks where your business is located, calls your store, and visits your location.
- Conversion: A customer decides to make a purchase.
Your job when setting marketing goals is to meet your customer at each part of the sales funnel. If you don’t have customers going into the top of the funnel, then you can’t convince them to move further down.
Clear metrics will determine the health of your sales funnel, help you better understand customer behavior, and show you the value of your marketing efforts.
15 Types of Marketing Goals Business Owners Set
Now that you have an idea for how you can look at the marketing process, you can start to set clear, measurable goals for your team. There are a few common marketing metrics that many companies use when setting their goals. So start with this list to see which data points are relevant for your brand.
- Impressions: The number of people who see your post, ad, or video – sometimes call eyeballs. This metric is used for digital marketing and traditional marketing like newspaper or TV ads.
- Clicks: Clicks represents the next step above impressions in digital marketing. It tracks the number of people who actually clicked on a post, email, or ad.
- Click-Thru-Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who saw an ad and clicked on it. If you have 10 impressions and two clicks, then your CTR is 20%.
- Engagement: In social media, engagement refers to any interactions with your content, such as clicks, likes, comments, or shares. More engagement means more people reached and more interest or awareness about your brand.
- Fans/Followers: These are the total number of people who like or follow your page on social media.
- Open Rate (OR): Used in email marketing, this is the percent of people who open an email that receive it. If 100 people receive your email message and 10 people open it, then your OR is 10%.
- Site Visits: The number of people who visit your website as a result of your marketing efforts.
- Conversions: The number of people who buy something, make an appointment, or fill out a contact form on your website.
- Conversion Rate (CR): The percent of visitors who convert after visiting your website. If 20 people visit your site and one person buys, then your CR is 5%.
- Calls: The number of people who call your business as a result of your marketing efforts.
- Store Visits: The number of people who come to your physical storefront as a result of your marketing efforts.
- Redemptions: The number of people to redeem a coupon or promotion code as a result of your marketing efforts.
- Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): The amount you spend on marketing to achieve one new customer. If a promotion brings in 10 customers and you spent $100, then your CPA is $10.
- Average Ticket: The average amount your customers spend at your business.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The value a customer brings you over time. If your customer spends $30 per month at your business over five years, their CLV is $1,800.
How to Track Your Marketing Metrics
Each of these marketing goals is important in their own unique way. For example:
- You can’t increase your engagement rate without first increasing your followers and impressions.
- You can’t grow your conversions without first driving more site visitors.
Setting small goals for growth on each of these metrics can help your overall marketing efforts flourish.
The good news is that tracking these goals doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. Many of these insights can be found on your social media business page or in Google Analytics. Some companies even manually track redemptions and monthly store visits. Compile this information in a quick and legible monthly report and start tracking your growth over time.
Turn Business Goals Into Action
Now that you see why marketing goals are so important and what metrics you can use to track and monitor your plans, get to work! Use this list of 51 marketing channels to identify the platforms you can use to grow your brand and reach your goals. Get the list: The 51 Most Effective Marketing Channels For the Year.