Roadmap to Success: Mission, Vision, Goals, Strategies, Tactics

No matter how simple we make marketing, small business owners will stress trying to determine their mission, vision, goals, strategies and tactics. These are the foundation of your marketing plan. Understanding what these are to your business are fundamental to developing a realistic marketing plan that focuses you on what is important to help you succeed. Let’s discuss each and simplify them.

Mission

What we want to accomplish

Your mission drives the business and its values. It is the reason for your existence. Your mission should guide, focus and direct your organization towards your ultimate destination.

• What do we do? Specifies what you deliver to your customers. This is not the process you provide but the results you achieve.
• How do we do it? Defines the type of products and services you sell and deliver to your customers.
• Who do we do it for? Identifies the target market that is most likely to buy your products and services.

Knowing the answers to these questions provides focus for your business and helps you move from the present into the future.

Masterful Marketing®’s mission is to help small businesses navigate the complex maze of online marketing. Our Masterful Marketing® Game Plan builds a professional web presence for the business while educating the business owner on the best marketing strategies for their business.

Vision

What we want to become

Your vision is a vivid description about what you want your business to be so that it inspires and motivates you. A well-defined vision creates a mental picture of the business that you are striving to build.

If you are looking at your business 3 or 5 years from now, what would you see? What would be hearing from customers? How would people describe your business?

Masterful Marketing®’s vision is to be recognized as one of the top 3 marketing brands for small businesses in the United States.

A clear vision statement helps you in many ways. It:

• Becomes your compass to keep you heading in the right direction.
• Helps decide whether an opportunity should be pursued based on whether it gets you closer to your vision.
• Enables you measure your progress, set goals, establish priorities, and know when to say no.
• Helps you focus on the important tasks while removing anything that wastes time.

Goals

Well-defined, targeted statements that give you clarity, direction and focus

It is important for the small business owner to define metrics that will lead you to your vision. Your business outcome goals are defined by functional area of your business such as revenue, sales, customer service, operational efficiency or human capital. Each functional area should effectively have one outcome goal within a 90 day period. Your business should focus on only one outcome goal based on revenue or new clients. 

Outcome goals for marketing will normally support the revenue and sales business goal because marketing is the main driver for reaching your top line revenue targets. And if you reach your revenue goals, does it matter if you increased your email list by 200 subscribers per month?

That is a loaded question because yes, growing your list, increasing traffic to your website and making your brand more visible in the market are all important. But what is the result of doing those things?

Hence why I prefer to define my marketing goals as a performance based projects, where each defined project has measurable results and help you move closer to your outcome goal. We create our marketing action plan in 90 day increments because what is planned within 90 days is achievable. Anything you plan beyond 90 days usually fails because you risk taking on too much and achieving nothing.

Performance Based Projects

Combine your strategies and tactics into a manageable plan

Each project is based on a particular strategy and is broken into the various tasks that need to be completed. Combining a strategy and all its associated tactics into a performance-based project helps you focus on what needs to be done to complete that project.

One marketing strategy may be using content marketing to drive new qualified leads. Qualified leads eventually turn into new clients or revenue, thereby supporting your business outcome goal.

So an example of a performance based project for content marketing would be the following.

Implement content marketing activities that drive 10 new qualified leads per week.

Now you can fill in the tactics or marketing activities that will help you get more leads.

• Develop a new lead magnet to attract more qualified leads to sign up for our list.
• Create an editorial calendar for blogging and social media posts
• Blog twice a month
• Share content daily on our social media platforms
• Create an email lead nurturing campaign that is sent to new subscribers of our email list.

It’s useful to include your tactics in a two week sprint noting priority so you get the most important activities underway or completed. One thing I’ve seen in using this 90 day action plan and 2 week sprint is we all try to cram too much within a two week time frame. and soon learn that you need to be much more selective in what you work on.

Stay Focused

As small business owners, we want to do many different things believing that more is better. In marketing, you are better off selecting fewer, more focused activities that help you make progress. Having too many goals, projects and tactics will only set you up for failure and disappointment. Define your mission, vision and goals for the business that will drive the marketing strategies and tactics. Figure out what’s important for you to accomplish in the next 90 days and go for it. Otherwise, you will be constantly distracted and won’t accomplish anything.

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