Marketing Goals
What are the marketing goals?
Marketing goals are an important element for any company that seeks to create awareness for itself, its products, or its services, in addition to being an essential component of your marketing strategy.
Setting “SMART marketing goals” is one of the best ways to set targets effectively.
Briefly, the SMART is an acronym for several words that represent the criteria that work to set targets:
S is for “Specific.”
M is for “Measurable.”
A is for “Actionable.”
R is for “Relevant.”
T is for “Time”
Which will be discussed in detail later on.
Marketing aims to build a positive interactive relationship between consumers and brands, so every effort made commercially must be in alignment with your marketing objectives.
When most companies look into starting the digital marketing field, they move directly to tools.
-What are the appropriate keywords to arrange on search engines?
-Should we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or marketing through influencers?
-Should we write content three times a day or thirty times a month?
Search engines, content, paid research, and social media platforms are essential pieces of a successful marketing approach, but they are just tools. Your efforts will be easier and more successful if you start setting goals and key performance indicators for your work.
Setting SMART marketing goals
In general, planning and determining goals are important in our lives, and defining our goals make it easier for us to reach and accomplish them, meaning that the concept of setting goals in marketing is not different from its general meaning.
When it comes to building communities and engaging the public, we do not always see immediate results as they range.
The duration of the results to show is between 50 to 90 days, therefore, it may be rather difficult to prove that our efforts will generate an actual return on investment.
Your efforts will be more effective if you start your work by setting goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) according to a framework for setting SMART marketing goals.
Whether you work alone or with a team, and if your goals are in the short-term or long-term.
Why is determining the marketing target important?
Marketers who post specific marketing goals are closer to achieving them compared to others. Ignoring data has a significant impact on the work as a whole! Therefore, your marketing goals must be well defined and designed in an integrated manner as they have a high impact on the success of your marketing campaigns.
The condition of the marketing goals is that they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
What are SMART marketing goals?
In setting digital marketing targets, we need to take into consideration all the measures of goals. Subsequently, you need to ensure their effectiveness and that they are applied correctly. SMART helps in assessing the quality of your goals and measures of success as well.
Again, the SMART marketing goals acronym -that will help in planning your goal- stands for:
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
A breakdown of the meaning of the terms above:
1- Specific:
Objectives must be written clearly, along with referring to a particular part of the work instead of writing general objectives. For example:
Instead of ” the goal: we’re going to improve online marketing” consider saying “the goal: increase the rate of website visits by 25%”
When creating a goal, be as concise and specific as possible, the more specific the goal, the more likely it is to be achieved.
Let your goals be specific, ask yourself these questions:
- What do you want to achieve?
- Why do you want to achieve it?
- How will you achieve it?
- Who is going to help you achieve it?
- Where are you going to work on the goal?
2- Measurable:
You can set measurable targets and therefore track them and measure results whether or not you’ve made progress.
In the previous example, the 25% increase in the rate of site visits can only be measured if you set the starting point (called the baseline) to know from where and where to move.
(Current visitation rate +% 25).
3- Actionable:
Some goals are impossible to achieve. Some are impossible due to their conflict with the rules of nature. And on the other hand, some are impossible due to the data you own.
However, in marketing terms, your goals must be achievable and realistically determined by your skills, current resources, and time frame. You cannot expect an imaginary increase in your site visits while you are still in the starting line.
If you received 500 visits to your company’s website last month, you cannot expect 50,000 visits in the upcoming month.
And vice versa, if you’ve created an average of 10 potential customers per month, you are unlikely to jump to 2,000 expected customers in a month.
These are objectives based on fictitious assumptions, which may cause frustration and failure in your work team, so you need to make sure that your goals are realistic and verifiable.
4- Relevant:
It has to be relevant to your business and important to you. As a result, you must think carefully before setting your goals.
For example, if your website is ineligible to receive more visitors, you may need to rethink your previous goal of increasing the visitor rate by 25%. Perhaps the goal is to design a new website over the next three months so that you can achieve your other goals by improving the site.
5-Timely:
The latest requirement for SMART is that the goal should have a deadline or a time frame for achieving it.
For example:
– What is the goal: Increasing the rate of visitors to your site.
– When? By the end of the third quarter of 2021.
Achieving your goals would be harder if they were not defined by a time frame. Besides that, you would not have a motive to achieve your goals if you didn’t set a time and date to start and finish.
Using the SMART marketing goals helps you keep your company’s activity focused, effective, and efficient. And more importantly, it will allow for effective and practical steps to achieve the desired goals.
As a marketer, you need to adhere to customer-focused marketing goals first by setting ideal and effective metrics, to improve your marketing strategy. In addition, to be at higher levels compared to other companies –competitors– without such skill -which grants you a competitive advantage-.
In conclusion,
To sum up, here is a piece of advice from our experience in Lhamim to help you in achieving your goals:
- Evaluate your results and progress to help you in achieving your vision on your upcoming goals.
- Analyze all your marketing activities through digital analysis tools
- Do not stop the quantitative and qualitative researches of your target group.
- Apply what you have learned when achieving your first goal to your other upcoming goals.
- Be flexible in marketing; flexibility is also part of intelligence.
- Identify and focus on your strengths, and repair your weaknesses, along with measuring the potential threats and opportunities to take percussion and benefit as well – SWOT Analysis–
- Keep an eye on digital marketing developments
- In your campaign, follow the 20/80 rule:
20 = Effort
80 = Research and analysis
In Lhamim, we are interested in designing successful marketing strategies based on specific and realistic objectives. We implement them within a given time frame to increase efficiency and help our customers achieve the marketing objectives of their business effectively and appropriately.
