When you are asked about your marketing goals, your initial response probably includes maximizing your leads, so that you can convert them into customers and grow revenue.
Other goals may be to increase your brand awareness, to be able to identify the most effective marketing avenues for your business, to out-do your competition, or to stick to your allocated marketing budget.
It is important to voice your goals and keep them front of mind, even though it can sometimes feel like you’re stating the obvious.
Coming up with a list of lofty ambitions can be intimidating. You know where you want to go and what you want to achieve, but how do you get there and convert your ambitions into results?
When you’re working with big goals, you can sometimes miss the trees for the forest, and because you haven’t taken the time to break down your big goals to achievable sub-goals, you’ll naturally find it difficult to measure your progress in any meaningful way.
If you don’t have a way to measure how you’re doing, you won’t know when or how to adjust your strategy, making agile marketing virtually impossible.
Here are some things to consider when setting and tracking your marketing goals:
Set clear goals and identify your desired results
In order to be able to measure the progress of your marketing, not to mention their ROI, it’s essential to conceptualize all of your goals as well as your desired results, taking care to make them as tangible as possible. For instance, if one of your goals is to generate leads through social media, identify the objectives that you must fulfil in order to achieve your end goal.
Those objectives could be getting a certain number of ‘Likes’ on your Facebook page, a certain number of Twitter followers or a certain number of visitors who come to your site in response to one or more your posts or tweets.
Measure your progress
The more clearly defined your goals and objectives are, the easier it will be to see even the smallest of movements. Another component worth capturing is the timeframe in which you want to achieve those results, this will allow you to better track your progress over a period time.
While there’s no need to obsess about daily progress, consistently keeping an eye on your goals and your status can build momentum, and this will also help you get a sense as to whether your goals and objectives are feasible or your stated timeframe needs to adjusting.
Inspect and adjust
While agile methodologies have been successfully implemented in software development, agile marketing is still a fairly new concept, but it has become increasingly popular and relevant. Agile means that, instead of seeing a planned out strategy all the way to the end (regardless of whether or not changes are warranted), you constantly monitor your progress, your successes and your goals and make adjustments as needed.
In a time where technology changes so rapidly and marketing channels continue to evolve, it’s important that you consistently determine what works and what doesn’t, and that you’re always flexible enough to adjust quickly to changing conditions.
If you are looking for assistance with setting marketing goals and understanding how to measure your results then consider attending our Measurable Marketing event and learn from Arrow Digital Marketing’s team of digital strategists how to set, measure and adjust your marketing goals.
