One of the most important aspects of marketing is goals. Without them, there is nothing to aim for and nothing to measure against. This is true for everything you are planning, if you don't know where you are going how will you arrive at the destination? So, yes, goals are key!
Once we have goals for our business and marketing in place we can create an intentional roadmap or a strategy which focusses on helping us reach them.
Once you have written your goals out, this also helps you to actually make them more tangible and real. Goals mean that you have a clearer idea about where you are headed and with these in place you will have something to work towards.
With marketing goals (social media marketing or any marketing) it's important that you create a goal that is SMART if possible. In the social media planner we have 2 goal sections. The main Goals page which is intended to help you write down what you want to achieve over all to achieve as a business, that may be personal to you i.e. work less and take 2 extra holidays or for the company you work for could be to increase revenues by 25% as an example.
Goals are very personal to the business or individual they serve and in reality there are no right or wrong ways to do this.
SMART goals on the other hand take those big goals you've set for the year and help you to break them down into easier to digest goals that stand for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Let's look at these more in detail:
Specific: Focus goal on a clearly defined specific metric
Measurable: You should be able to measure the goal set against the specific metric set
Achievable: Your goal must be achievable ask yourself How realistic is the goal, based on everything in consideration including constraints? Can I accomplish this goal or am i just hoping for the best?
Relevant: Ask: Does this goal seem worthwhile? Does this meet our needs?
Time-bound: Your goal should have an end date so that you have a timeframe to measure against.
Going back to your overall business goals, your marketing goal should also align with the bigger business goal you set at the start. For an example if your business goal for next year is to increase revenues by 25% ask yourself how can the marketing get us closer to achieving this goal? One thing that's worked well for us is to set our SMART goals in 90 day periods, this way we can plan activities that help us reach our goals over 3 months which gives us ample time to tweak them if nessesary.
So let's say the business goal is to increase revenue by 25% in new business.
A good 90 day marketing objective would be:
By 30th march 2020 my companies marketing will reach a potential new customer base of 10,000 resulting in 100 new leads and 45 new customers.
You can then start to create your campaigns and projects that will help you to achieve this goal. These could be by running a facebook ad campaign, starting a new twitter chat or even creating a social media video ad that picks up organic traction. As with all of these ideas, they need to align to the goal and be achievable.
A bad example is:
Let's make a video, make it go viral and get a load more customers... That's not going to work and it's not very measurable and certainly not very attainable or proven to be so.
It's not that easy to create goals and break them down into really measurable and specific activities but It's worth doing as it helps to keep you on track, keeps your activity accountable to clients and managers and it means you are able to clearly explain any marketing activity as well as see clearly what worked and what didn't.
Say one of your goals didn't get reached but you could clearly show what you had done and what the aim was, you now mitigate the risk of not reaching the target again or making the same mistake twice as it's all documented, you should be able to see what went wrong. You can also show that you generated traffic or engagement but perhaps conversions weren't happening on the website, you can now add to your report that that the website isn't really optimised properly and make the recommendation that it's changed, and in your own business you can just crack on and get it sorted before testing again.
The more information we have documented, the more chance we have of making the right and informed decisions for our marketing and business activities.
So get started on your goals and drop me a message if you need any help! Next up we'll be talking about creating a customer or several customer personas and why these are integral to your marketing strategy, because with your goals and a great understanding of your customers, you'll become unstoppable in 2020.
