Why do we make the decisions we do? As a marketer, you need to justify your marketing efforts by demonstrating the results they produce. To achieve this, you need clear goals. Here are the questions you should ask yourself when setting goals in your marketing plan.
What is the value of writing a blog post like this to strengthen the brand? As the writer, I must constantly ask myself this and weigh it against other efforts. Otherwise, it is easy to do what is simple rather than what needs to be done.
Traditionally, it has been quite difficult to know the actual impact of marketing. Broadly speaking, it was known that without marketing, sales would decline, but it was hard to determine which effort actually drove sales. With digitalization, we now have better tools to measure communication and our marketing efforts, but it is still challenging to set reasonable goals for what we want to achieve.
When we help our clients develop marketing plans, a significant part of the discussion revolves around the actual objectives of the marketing.
This is how we think. Here is a step-by-step guide.
Your marketing should support your business's sales. But what should your sales lead to?
Look into your business plan and study the roots of your organization. There, you will likely find the genuine goals that give your business its reason for existence—the purpose of why the business is run and exists at all.
By ensuring that your marketing goals align with these, your marketing efforts will automatically support your business and organizational goals.
Dare to be visionary. Dare to think big and aim for the stars. We start big and then break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Visionary goals that support marketing can be: (examples)
... but they can also be about becoming market leaders, dominating the industry, the country, the world. Yes, it can be as big as you want as long as you can quantify what it actually means to be, for example, a market leader—otherwise, you will never know if you succeed.
It is also crucial that your goals are genuine. It is a matter of credibility. Too many organizations and companies paint big words with a broad brush, only to completely forget what they painted moments later. It neither feels genuine nor credible, and customers and clients can now distinguish between what is truly genuine and what are empty words.
We also want to raise a warning about setting too many goals, especially when it comes to goals that are meant to convey and measure our reason for existence as a company or organization.
If you concretize your genuine, visionary goals one level, you land in business goals and sales goals, which your business has probably formulated in its business plan and budget.
When you formulate the goals in your marketing plan, you should therefore coordinate them with your CEO and sales manager.
As a marketer, you must be able to show that the effect of the brand being visible is that the organization receives enough leads of a sufficiently high quality, so that the sales department can move from prospecting to sales work.
Business goals and sales goals can be: (type example)
What we should focus on is setting clear (crystal clear) goals that are relevant to us and our own organization, regardless of who we are. The most important thing is that our sales goals are completely in line with our business goals, which are completely in line with our big visionary and genuine goals as an organization.
If it is not clear and easy to see how sales goals lead to business goals and business goals to visionary goals, then you should redo your goals.
What should your marketing achieve to best support these sales goals, and at the same time meet the customers' needs?
By translating the above-mentioned business goals into marketing goals, it becomes clear which concrete communication tasks, campaigns and activities you should prioritize when planning.
Often there is a discrepancy between business goals and marketing goals – they simply don't connect, making it difficult to demonstrate the value of marketing.
Remember that marketing itself is not a goal. Launching a campaign is not a goal in itself – the goal is what the campaign should result in.
For example, the goal of content marketing is not to create content - it is to create more relevant contact surfaces with potential customers and build long-term loyalty, credibility and strengthen the brand, so that you extend customer lifetime value and position yourself as an authority in your industry.
Marketing objectives can be: (type example)
When you have formulated these goals, it becomes clearer why you should prioritize replacing those 300 printed campaign leaflets with digital mailings, why you should invest in banner ads and PPC ads instead of catalog campaigns and so on.
Each channel we operate on should have its own goals.
Every effort we make should be aimed at achieving or strengthening the relevant goals that guide our work.
Unless we can define win / fail in advance, the likelihood is that we spend time and resources on efforts that do not get us anything.
Finally, you yourself need to be able to appreciate the value of meeting the various goals.
What is it worth in kroner that a visitor to the website fills in the contact form?
What would the same thing have cost to achieve with a physical presence at a fair, or with PR? (What is the opportunity cost?)
What is it worth in kroner that a new parent in the target group sees your banner?
For example, if you know that 30% of those who see your banner click on it, and that 30% of these then click through to a purchase or book a meeting via your website, which in itself is worth SEK 5,000, you can calculate the monetary value of each banner exposure.
By putting numbers on the activities that will help you achieve your goals - monetary values - and calculating what percentage of your budget each marketing goal should receive, you can easily see how much time and resources you should spend on your marketing activities. In other words, how to make your marketing plan.
Here, it is also made visible which efforts and marketing measures actually bear fruit and which do not generate any meaningful results. The smart marketer shifts resources from these actions to other actions, which are proven to generate better results.
When we help clients with this, we divide the goals into macro goals (main end goals) and micro goals (sub goals, sub conversions).
Together with you and our experts, we workshop those optimal formulations that take the macro goals and turn them into clear, easy-to-understand and concrete marketing goals that help your employees in the marketing department to better support your sales department.
Do you want help formulating and estimating the value of your goals?
Contact us and we will do a workshop together, which will result in a guiding target document for your marketing – the framework for your marketing plan.