Masterful Marketing » Marketing Goals

Reviewing Your Goals

Debra — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:10:53 +0000

This is the second post in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

Your goals can deal with many different elements of your business. You can have goals to drive more business from information products, generate better quality inbound leads, increase the awareness of your brand, drive more visitors to your web site or get more repeat clients. The primary purpose for setting goals is to guide your efforts and measure their success.

Regular review of your goals should be something you do more often than once a year, but now is as good a time as any to take a look. Reviewing your goals is not about looking back but about seeing if your goals are moving you forward. It is also not an exercise where you beat yourself up for not getting them done! The review is to determine which ones you accomplished and which ones you didn’t and why.

Do you have a vision for your business?

Chances are very good that those goals you did not accomplish were not aligned with the vision you have set for your business. Setting goals that help you get where you want to go makes those goals so very much more important to you and therefore, more likely to be accomplished.

And if you don’t have a vision, you should! Your vision is not just the dream about what you want your business to look like, but your beacon that inspires, gives you direction and keeps you on course. There are benefits of having a clear vision and the accompanying goals that help you get there:

It focuses you on where to spend your time, effort and resources. It helps you assess the many opportunities that become available and make choices based on whether the opportunity gets you closer to your vision.
When you become overwhelmed, you can look at whether what you are doing is heading you towards your vision. If it isn’t, then you need to decide whether continuing to spend time and effort on this activity is truly worth it!

Do your goals help you get to your vision?

Look at your goals for this past year and determine which ones you want to continue to strive for based on your vision and which ones just go away. For every goal you set, make sure it helps you get to where you are trying to go. Be focused on the ultimate target, set goals that will take you to your dream and you will see great things happen to your business.

What’s your vision for your business? How will you realign your goals to achieve your vision?

Stay on Course for Marketing Success

Debra — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:48:42 +0000

I’m getting a lot of queries from my clients in the form of “What do you think of this?” where “this” is a proposal from a niche marketing company for them to buy a plethora of services from PPC Advertising to social media marketing services.

I appreciate that these companies need to sell their services to survive, but as marketing companies they should do a better job at targeting their offerings.

Recently I have taken on a client that was spending $2000 per month on Google Adwords with a company that I won’t name. As part of their service, they make a proxy of your Web site so they can track the results of the campaign. All this does is eliminate your site from the organic search engine results pages because the this company is drawing all traffic to their copy of your site. They also put their own phone number on the site so all calls to the company get routed through their service.
Another client sent me a proposal for SEO, PPC and a blog. The proposal nicely said that their current web site was not optimized for key search engine phrases. Upon evaluation, the site appeared on the first page (and in many cases in the first position) for each of their keyword phrases.
Finally another client sent me a 10 page proposal from a social media marketing firm that was proposing to create videos for viewing on YouTube. The proposal was totally untargeted at this small service business. In addition, it was poorly written with grammatical errors. For a marketing company to send such an unprofessional piece to a prospect leaves me concerned with the company’s credibility and what they will do with your precious marketing dollars.

Marketing Lesson

Evaluate all opportunities against your overall marketing plan.

Do these opportunities help you achieve the goals you have set?
Will they help you reach your target market?
Do they fit into your overall marketing budget?
What will you trade off to invest in this new activity?
Does it make sense for your business at all?

Stay on course with your marketing strategy to ensure consistent results. It’s ok to adjust the plan based on new information, opportunities that make sense for your business or an infusion of funds that you weren’t expecting. Otherwise resist the temptation to try something “new” just because you think you have to. You don’t.

Why Your Marketing Plan Depends on Goals

Debra — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:44:34 +0000

If you haven’t put together your 2008 marketing plan, it’s not too late. In a post from the Vista Consulting library, Year End Marketing Planning, we talk about a few tips on how to use what happened this past year to help you plan for the next 12 month.

But if you haven’t done a lot of marketing in your business or are starting a new business, you will need to spend some time on developing your purpose, vision and goals.

The Purpose

You need to do is understand the purpose of your business. Why did you start your business in the first place? What mark are you trying to leave on the world by being in business? Do you love what you do? Do you get up every day looking forward to your work?

The Vision

What is your vision for your business? Where do you want it to be in 3 to 5 years? A vision statement is a statement about what you want your business to be. It is your dream of the future without respect to current resources. It inspires, gives you direction and keeps you on course.

Goals

Goals are the critical piece of the marketing plan. To develop a sensible marketing plan, you need to know what you want to achieve with your business and how you are going to get there (see my post Business Goals Help You Plan Your Marketing). Determine your goals for the year. You can break them into business and marketing goals or just list all goals together. I like to split my goals into both categories because for me, business goals are those things I want to do to change my business. Marketing goals are things I do to keep me in business and need to be the quantifiable, measurable targets I aim for, such as number of new clients, percentage increase in unique visitors to your web site or number of speaking opportunities you want to achieve. Include a mix of financial goals, such as amount of income, number of sales, and amount of profit, and non-financial goals, such as books you will read, networking events to attend, and number of articles published.

Understanding these three elements of your marketing plan helps you focus on the important activities that will help you get where you want to be at the end of the year. Without goals, you run the risk of wandering aimlessly throughout the year, unfocused and possibly missing opportunities that could elevate your business to a new level.